Documentation
FREE 4 ALL LINK NETWORK: V3.0
System Requirements
- Unix, Lynyx or NT Operating System
- Perl 5 with sockets library installed
- Sendmail
- Ability to run cgi scripts and write to files
OUTSIDE of your cgi-bin
Preliminaries
- Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web
server host. Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.
Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4. Ask your
administrator if you are not sure.
- Download the tarfile for this program and
save it to your desktop.
- Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a
program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download
WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM.
- After you have unpacked the TAR archive you
will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop. Now you have to do some
basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them). Use a text editor
such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files. These
are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as
word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.
Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".
This is normal.
Preparing the CGI scripts
Define Path To PERL 5
The first step is to open up each and every
file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script. Each of the
cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is
installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first
line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like
this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
If the path to perl 5 on your web server is
different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect
the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do
not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.
Configure the .cgi files
configure.cgi
This file pretty much runs the whole
show. If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly. In
other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY. Ask your
administrator if you need to. Below are the variables used for mastergate in ALL of
the other cgi scripts. All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out
where certain things are.
$SENDMAIL=
"/path/to/sendmail";
This is the path to sendmail on your webserver
$admin =
"you\@yourdomain.com";
- your email address - MUST KEEP BACKSLASH"
Confused? My email
address is webmaster@superscripts.com. So here I would use
webmaster\@superscripts.com. Don't worry about trying to understand - its a perl5
thing. You have to use the backslash.
$site =
"http://www.yourdomain.com/path/to/html/ffan/index.html";
Full URL to the link page of your FFAN
installation.
$linkpage =
"/path/to/index.html";
Full PATH to the link page.
$cgibinurl =
"/path/to/submissions.txt";
Full URL to the ffan directory inside your cgi-bin
that contains all of the CGI and .txt files.
$cgibinpath =
"/path/to/message.txt";
Full PATH to the ffan directory inside your cgi-bin
that contains all of the CGI and .txt files.
$localurl =
"yourdomain.com";
YOUR SIMPLIFIED DOMAIN NAME. For example I
would put superscripts.com NOT www.suprscripts.com or /