NOTE: These instructions were valid for ACS v4, but have not been tested with OpenACS and the ArsDigita binary distributions are no longer available. Currently (10/2003), the best option to get OpenACS 5.7.0 running on Windows is to use VMware and John Sequeira's Oasis VM distribution
Bug reports: http://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs
Philosophy: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community (the community chapter of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing)
Technical background: http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/
With the recent release of a win32 version of AOLserver, it is now possible to run the OpenACS on Windows2000 and Windows98. This document explains the steps necessary to get the OpenACS installed and running on your machine.
We do not recommend running a production server on Windows98. But the platform is more than sufficient for working the problem sets and for getting a feel for the OpenACS.
You'll need to use the ArsDigita binary distribution of AOLserver for the Win32 platform, which contains patches for several problems we have come across in the default AOLserver binary distribution. See the ArsDigita AOLserver 3 distribution page for details.
You can download the binary distribution from the ArsDigita download page under "ArsDigita AOLserver 3 Binary Distribution for Win32." Please read the release notes in the distribution for configuration notes specific to the version you are downloading.
Windows 2000 or Windows 98
WinZip or any tool that can extract gzipped/tarred archives.
zsh (free; included in the binary distribution). If this link is broken try http://www.zsh.org.
Oracle 8 relational database management system
AOLserver (free)
Oracle driver for AOLserver (free)
It is helpful if you have Oracle interMedia Text for full-text searches. We're also trying to make our system work with the PLS System, available free from http://www.pls.com.
Although the zsh shell is the only command-line tool
    required to install the OpenACS, if you are a UNIX person used to typing
    ls instead of dir you'll get along much
    better with the Cygwin toolkit from RedHat (available at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin).
    This is a development library and set of tools that gives you a very
    UNIX-like environment under Windows. In particular, it includes
    bash, gzip and tar, which you can
    use to perform the OpenACS installation instead of WinZip and zsh.
    When you install Oracle, a good rule of thumb is "every default
    setting is wrong." We will not discuss Oracle configuration here
    except to mention that the OpenACS requires Oracle's NLS_DATE_FORMAT
    parameter be set to 'YYYY-MM-DD'. Fixing this depends on whether
    Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows NT (yes,
    that's Windows 
If it runs on your machine, proceed as follows:
Run Oracle Administration Assistant for Windows NT
Navigate using the Explorer-style control in the left panel and select the Oracle Home for the database you wish to use.
Bring up its properties dialog and add a parameter NLS_DATE_FORMAT with value 'YYYY-MM-DD' (without the quotes)
Verify the date format by logging into the database using SQL Plus
      and run the following query: select sysdate from
      dual;
Otherwise you will need to perform a little registry surgery as follows:
Run regedit and navigate down the registry keys to
      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ORACLE.
        Choose the appropriate subtree; this will be HOME0 if
        you only have on einstallation of Oracle. 
        
If you are an Oracle achiever and have more than one Oracle installation on your machine, you will see
HOME0, HOME1, HOME2, etc. Choose the subtree that corresponds to the Oracle installtion you wish to use with the OpenACS.
If the NLS_DATE_FORMAT key is already present,
      double-click on its value and change it to 'YYYY-MM-DD' 
      (without the quotes). If the key does not
      exist, choose Edit->New->String Value from the menu
      and type NLS_DATE_FORMAT for the name of the new value to
      create it. Then double-click on the empty value to change it.
Verify the date format by logging into the database using SQL Plus
      and run the following query: select sysdate from
      dual;
For more information on Oracle configuration look at http://photo.net/wtr/oracle-tips
    or search the OpenACS forums. One other note: the "nuke a user" admin page and
    Intermedia won't run unless you set open_cursors = 500
    for your database.
    Extract the ArsDigita AOLserver distribution onto the C:
    drive into the default aol30 directory. You can install it
    on any drive, but it will make your life easier if you keep the AOLserver
    binary and your OpenACS instance on the same drive. For the rest of these
    instructions, we'll assume that you used drive C:. 
    We recommend rooting webserver content in c:\web. Since most
    servers these days are expected to run multiple services from multiple IP
    addresses, each server gets a subdirectory from c:\web. For
    example, http://scorecard.org would be rooted at
    c:\web\scorecard on one of our machines and if
    http://jobdirect.com were on the same box then it would be
    at c:\web\jobdirect. 
For the sake of argument, we're going to assume that your service
    is called "yourdomain", is going to be at
    http://yourdomain.com and is rooted at
    c:\web\yourdomain in the Windows 2000 file system. Note that
    you'll find our definitions files starting out with
    "yourdomain.com".
download the OpenACS (see above) into
      c:\temp\acs.tar.gz
use WinZip (or equivalent) to extract the files to
      c:\web\yourdomain
   
 You'll now find that c:\web\yourdomain\www contains the
    document root and c:\web\yourdomain\tcl contains Tcl scripts
    that are loaded when the AOLserver starts up. 
The entire server will behave in an unhappy manner if it connects to Oracle and finds that, for example, the users table does not exist. Thus you need to connect to Oracle as whatever user the AOLserver will connect as, and feed Oracle the table definitions.
        load the states, country_codes and
        counties tables using the load-geo-tables
        shell script in the c:\web\yourdomain\www\install
        directory. You will need to open a console window and run 
zsh load-geo-tables foo/foopassword
You most likely will see a slew of "Commit point reached . . . " messages. This does not indicate a problem.
        cd to c:\web\yourdomain\www\doc\sql and feed Oracle the
        .sql files that you find there. There is a meta-loader file,
        load-data-model.sql, that includes the other files in the proper
        order. To use it, open a console window and run 
sqlplus foo/foopassword < load-data-model.sql
        If you have interMedia installed, while still in
        c:\web\yourdomain\www\doc\sql, run 
zsh load-site-wide-search foo foopassword ctxsys-password
        Note that there's no slash between foo and
        foopassword here. The third argument,
        ctxsys-password, is the password for interMedia
        Text's special ctxsys user.
      
You will need two configuration files. The first is a Tcl file with
    configuration information for AOLserver. This should be called
    yourdomain and should be located in
    c:\aolserve3_0. The second is an .ini file that configures
    the OpenACS and is discussed below. Note that pathnames in
    yourdomain must use forward slashes rather than the Windows
    back slashes. This is also true for the .ini file.
The following items must be defined in yourdomain:
three database pools: main, subquery, and log. They must be named as such. The default pool will be "main".
the auxconfig directory which contains the .ini file:
      c:\web\yourdomain\parameters
the pageroot: c:\web\yourdomain\www
the directory containing the TclLibrary:
      c:\web\yourdomain\tcl
You can use our template file as a starting point (you'll need to save this file with a rather than .txt extension).
    If you want a system that works, go to
    c:\web\yourdomain\parameters and copy ad.ini to
    yourdomain.ini (or any other name different from
    ad.ini). You don't actually have to delete
    ad.ini. 
Each section of yourdomain.ini has a hardcoded
    "yourservername" in the name (e.g.
    [ns/server/yourservername/acs]). This means that the OpenACS
    will ignore your configuration settings unless your AOLserver name
    happens to be "yourservername". Therefore you must go through
    yourdomain.ini and change "yourservername" to
    whatever you're calling this particular AOLserver (look at the
    server name in the nsd file for a reference).
Unless you want pages that advertise a community called
    "Yourdomain Network" owned by
    "webmaster@yourdomain.com", you'll probably want to edit
    the text of yourdomain.ini to change system-wide parameters.
    If you want to see how some of these are used, a good place to look is
    c:\web\yourdomain\tcl\ad-defs. The Tcl function,
    ad_parameter, is used to grab parameter values from the .ini
    file.
    Now you're ready to start things up. Before installing as a Windows
    service, you might want to test the setup for configuration errors. Open
    up a console window and go to c:\aol30. Then run 
bin\nsd -ft yourdomain.tcl
This will print all the AOLserver messages to the console so you can see them.
Try to connect to your new server with a web browser. If you see the
    message "Error in serving group pages", you probably forgot to
    copy the ad.ini file in c:\web\yourdomain\parameters If
    everything seems ok, you can kill the server with Control-c and then
    issue the following command to install as a Windows service:
bin\nsd -I -s yourdomain -t yourdomain.tcl
 You can now configure error recovery and other Windows aspects of the
    service from the Services control panel. If you make further changes to
    yourdomain or yourdomain.ini you should stop
    and start the service from the Services control panel. 
Now, you need to protect the proper administration directories of the OpenACS. You decide the policy although we recommend requiring the admin directories be accessible only via an SSL connection. Here are the directories to consider protecting:
/doc (or at least /doc/sql/ since some AOLserver configurations will allow a user to execute SQL files)
/admin
any private admin dirs for a module you might have written that are not underneath the /admin directory
    OpenACS will define two users: system and
    anonymous. It will also define a user group of system administrators.
    You'll want to add yourself as a user (at /register/ ) and then add
    yourself as as member of the site-wide administration group. Start by
    logging out as yourself and logging in as the system user (email of
    "system"). Change the system user's password. Visit the
    https://yourservername.com/admin/ug/ directory and add your
    personal user as a site-wide administrator. Now you're bootstrapped! 
If you do not know what the system user's password is connect to Oracle using SQL Plus and run the following query:
select password from users where last_name = 'system';
    The OpenACS ships with a user named "anonymous" (email
    "anonymous") to serve as a content owner. If you're
    operating a restricted-access site, make sure to change the anonymous
    user's password. In recent versions of the OpenACS you cannot log into
    "anonymous" because the account does not have a valid user
    state. Log in as a sysadmin and change the anonymous user's password
    from https://yourservername/admin/users. You should read the
    documentation for user registration and
    access control and decide what the appropriate user state is for
    anonymous on your site. 
A few pointers:
the /register directory contains the login and registration scripts. You can easily redirect someone to /register/index to have them login or register.
the /pvt directory is for user-specific pages. They can only be accessed by people who have logged in.
Run the acceptance tests in /doc/acceptance-test
You can run multiple instances of the OpenACS on a physical machine but they must each be set up as a separate Windows service. Each instance of the OpenACS must have its own:
Oracle tablespace and a user account with the appropriate permissions on that tablespace. Each of these tablespaces must have the OpenACS data model loaded.
file with the appropriate settings including server name, auxconfig, ipaddress, and port.
Copy of the acs files in an appropriate directory under
      c:\web.
    Suppose you wish to run two services: lintcollectors.com and
    iguanasdirect.com. You would need the following: 
an Oracle tablespace, lintcollectors with a user
      lintcollectors and password secretlint
an Oracle tablespace, iguanasdirect with a user
      iguanasdirect and password secretiguanas
 For each of these tablespaces/users you would load the OpenACS data model as
    described above. Then in c:\aolserver3_0
    create files for each service, i.e. lintcollectors and
    iguanasdirect. These files would point to their respective
    pageroots, c:\web\lintcollectors\www and
    c:\web\iguanasdirect\www; their respective auxconfigdirs,
    c:\web\lintcollectors\parameters and
    c:\web\iguanasdirect\parameters; etc. In the respective
    auxconfigdirs would be the files lintcollectors.ini and
    iguanasdirect.ini. 
Now open a console window and go to c:\aol30. You'll
    start up the two services as follows:
bin\nsd -I -s lintcollectors -t lintcollectors.tcl bin\nsd -I -s iguanasdirect -t iguanasdirect.tcl
 In the services control panel you should see two services:
    AOLserver-lintcollectors and
    AOLserver-iguanasdirect.