Chapter 3. Installation

Table of Contents

1. Preparations
1.1. Software
1.2. Hardware
2. Configure
2.1. Host System Configuration
2.2. Filesystem paths
2.3. Webserver specific stuff
2.4. Email
2.5. Compiling features
3. Installation
4. config.xml (for RPMs and DEBs too)
4.1. Configuration sections of config.xml
4.2. How to setup two management interfaces on one server?

1. Preparations

1.1. Software

OpenCA is not a complete monolithic system. It uses several software products from other developers of the Open Source community. The following things are used:
  • Apache

  • mod_ssl

  • OpenSSL

  • OpenLDAP

  • Perl

We use a lot of different Perl modules. Usually OpenCA installs all these needed modules. Sometimes we have problems with already installed modules.
  • Digest::MD5 is usually problematical on modern Linux distros because Perl 5.8 includes Digest::MD5 already and some old version of Digest::MD5 has big problems with new Perl. You can simple outcomment Digest::MD5 in src/modules/Makefile.

  • Gettext causes sometimes trouble because version 1.0.0 has a different export behaviour than 1.0.1. The result of this small "bug" is that OpenCA doesn't work with gettext 1.0.0. Please update your gettext or remove it from the system.

  • CGI::Session is sometimes problematical if you use OpenCA's access control. If you login then OpenCA sends you a cookie and write some session data to the disk. Old version of CGI::Session doesn't flush the data automatically and so the data files on the server disk are empty. OpenCA::AC includes some fixes but it is strongly recommended to have only CGI::Session 3.92+ on your system.

1.2. Hardware

OpenCA was tested on several softwarearchitectures but not on so many hardware architectures. Therefore we publish a list of used hardware. Please remember that OpenCA can be used on any system which support Apache, mod_ssl, OpenSSL and Perl. So if you have Unix box then it is usually possible to run an OpenCA on it.
  • i386 with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD

  • UltraSparc with Solaris 8 and Linux

  • PowerPC with AIX