Thunderstone Support Forums

I’ve read the posts relating to Webinator under NT & IIS. I particularly liked the following:

“There is not much to say about the NT installation under normal circumstances. You just run the setup.exe, it asks a few simple questions, then you're finished.”

In a nutshell—BS! There’s not much that could be further from the truth! It’s far easier to install perl apps under IIS than Webinator. Lets dispense with setup.exe and get down to what goes where and permissions. Do you not have simple, terse, step-by-step, instructions? Surely when you see the number of posts about installation, you’d have to wake up to the fact that you’re doing something quite wrong!

Hope to see something better, soon.

Colin West
cwest@justmail.net

Which version are you trying, as you are posting in the pre-v2.5 group. We have made several improvements recently.

Simply put the texis.exe goes in a directory with execute permissions, such as c:\inetpub\scripts on a fairly standard IIS install. The Webinator directory with the graphics, scripts and database in the document portion of the website, c:\inetpub\wwwroot in a normal install. You will either need to make the webinator directory writable by the IUSR_<machine> account, or compile the scripts by hand with texis -C if you change them. You also need to make sure that texissct.dll in the SYSTEM32 directory has full control/everybody.

I can see this is going to be like extracting hen's teeth Is this what you're trying to say:

1. texistct.dll should be in system32 directory and ensure or change perms to "everyone:full control"
2. Publish the following directories and files to the website:

/webinator/default.html
/webinator/newsearch
/webinator/search
/webinator/uninst.isu
/webinator/webinator.html
/webinator/*.gif
/webinator/_master/*.tbl
/webinator/_master/*.btr
/webinator/bin/*.exe
/webinator/bin/readme.txt
/webinator/db/.htacess
/webinator/db/*.tbl
/webinator/db/gw.log
/webinator/db/html.blb
/webinator/db/sys*.*
/webinator/db/*.btr
../cgi-bin/texis.exe

ensure or change perms on webinator directory to -rw for IUSR

Now, what params have to be changed to correctly point to scripts, db, etc.?

I guess the question is, how are you using Webinator. Are you crawling on one machine, and then copying the files to the webserver, or will you be crawling on the webserver? If copying a crawled database to the webserver it would be helpful to do a gw -unindex and gw -index before moving it up.

You will need to change the database in the search and newsearch files to point to the appropriate directory.

For the project I’m working on, my intention is to use webinator to point to a list of urls that users will append to a file (via a html form). The urls will be hosted on many servers, not just “theirs.”

I think the question was "where are you installing webinator to do the crawling and searching from?", not "what are you crawling?".

Sarcasm aside, of which I’m often guilty and I hope it isn’t taken personally, the issue is how to install webinator! Just this continuous interaction accentuates the issue of installation.

Which files go where?
What are their perms?
Where or what are the params to change to make the app work?

The simple answer again is that you should run the setup.exe program on the machine you want it installed on. You will be asked for the webroot, and a directory which has Script and Execute permissions. The setup will put the files in the right place. If you are running setup on a different machine than you want to run it on then the procedure you give above should work, although I don't know the details of ./cgi-bin/ on the server you have. The permissions you had were correct, and I answered with where to change the parameters, which is the search and newsearch files.

We're getting rather circular here. Do you have a NT site I can browse to where webinator is installed? If I persist, I'll probably write an install paper that makes much more sense than what I've experienced so far.

Circular is a good description, and we seem to be talking slightly at cross purposes. It would probably help just to start over, and ask, what is the problem you are having with the setup.exe as provided.