Technical requirements to run the Clickshare Web Server on your site

Software Status

Your technical operations personnel need to know only a few things about the Clickshare Access and Payment Service:

• We run on the Unix operating system. Ports of our software have been completed for
  • Sun Solaris 2.x.
  • Digital Unix 3.2
  • Silicon Graphics IRIX 5.x
  • BSDI BSD/OS 2.1
  • Linux 1.2.x

  A port to IBM AIX will follow soon, also as a beta release. A port of the Clickshare Web Server to Microsoft Windows NT is planned.

• Our web server is based on easy to install, well-understood NCSA web server. Nearly all Unix webmasters have the experience necessary to install this server. Over 70% of commercial sites use this server or one of its derivatives.

  Clickshare is currently developing a port to the Apache Web Server, currently the Internet's most popular Web Server, and a derivative of the NCSA Server. This port will be available as an "alpha" release in October 1996. The experience with Apache will allow us to port to the Netscape server in Fall 1996.

• Clickshare anticipates that it will add secure-commerce features to its server implementations when export rules and restrictive patent requirements are eased. We expect that commercial secure server vendors will port Clickshare code to their implementations as market forces demand (an effort we will support).

  The folks at Community Connexion have developed a secure version of the Apache Web Server.

Server Installation Information

1. Auxiliary software is included. It is contained in a single directory tree and can be executed from that tree or from normal bin directories. The auxiliary software includes:
   • registration database management tools
   • email redirector
   • testing and verification tools

2. Our source release requires the Free Software Foundation GNU cc ( "gcc") compiler suite. The current release -- 2.7.0 -- compiles easily on all the major unix architectures, including Linux and BSDI on Intel machines. All our software is written with and for "gcc". Our auxiliary code -- CGI scripts and the like - requires Perl version 5, which is also available on all major unix architecture.

   For the beta Clickshare release, these development tools need to be available on the server workstation.

3. Sites currently running a commercial secure server can run either Clickshare or the commercial daemon on the primary service port with the remaining daemon, as well as others, on auxiliary ports.

   Sites running Personal Library Software Inc.'s PLWeb search engine can be configured to simultaneously address search queries to one or more such daemons on the same machine.

4. Our software does NOT consume lots of machine resources -- that is, over and above what is consumed by a "normal" web server. We recommend that a minimum of 32MB of RAM and 1GB of hard disk storage be available on any of the hardware mentioned above. Those machines that will run full X Window System displays in addition to running the HTTP server should have a minimum 64MB of RAM.