Installation

This section details installation of Business Information Server on UNIX. Windows installation is described in section Installation on Windows.

After Apache has been successfully configured, either start or restart it for the configuration to take effect.

BIS for UNIX is installed as part of the extend® shared library installation. Following installation, there are a couple of configuration scripts that need to be run to complete the installation of BIS and cause it to execute whenever the UNIX machine boots.

Before running the configuration script, create a new UNIX user account or choose an existing UNIX user account to run the BIS service engine. This account must have the permissions necessary to access the data files for the COBOL program. After choosing this user account, login as root and change directory to the install directory within the installation directory and run the config_bis_daemons.sh shell script.

The config_bis_daemons.sh script asks if you want to configure the BIS Service Engine options; answer Y. The current Service Engine options appear. Enter 1 to change the user account for the Service Engine and then enter the user account that you chose or created above. Finally, enter X to begin the configuration process.

Once the configuration process is complete, the config_bis_daemons.sh script displays the appropriate command to start the service daemons manually. This command is only necessary if you want to start the service daemons without rebooting the machine.

The second configuration script to run is config_bis_apache.sh. This script creates a configuration file named mod_xbis.conf that can be given to Apache to load the BIS Request Handler. On some distributions of Apache, all that is necessary is to copy this file to the Apache's conf.d directory. On others, you must edit the Apache conf/httpd.conf file and insert an include directive to the mod_xbis.conf file. When you run the config_bis_apache.sh script, it displays further instructions on installing the configuration file. Redirect standard output to a file to refer to these instructions later, or use the copy feature of your terminal emulator, if it supports that. See Configuring Apache for more details on configuring Apache.

After Apache has been successfully configured, either start or restart it for the configuration to take effect.

Configuring Apache

Configure the Apache web server so the mod_xbis.conf file produced by the config_bis_apache.sh script is read by Apache when it starts. If your version of the Apache installation has a conf.d directory, place the mod_xbis.conf configuration file into this directory. If your version of Apache does not use a conf.d directory, edit the main httpd.conf configuration file to include the following line:

Include Your-COBOL-Installation-Directory/etc/mod_xbis.conf

Any further changes to the configuration of the Apache portion of BIS should be made to the mod_xbis.conf configuration file.

See Configuration After Installation for more information on configuring the Apache Request Handler.