Installing from source

Installing Apache

Build or install Apache 2.2.6 or later.

When installing/building the Apache Portable Runtime (APR), make sure that you build the required database adapter for the DBD module for PostgreSQL.

Building Apache modules

mod_form

Install mod_form. The sources are here:

• http://apache.webthing.com/svn/apache/forms/mod_form.c

• http://apache.webthing.com/svn/apache/forms/mod_form.h

Its header file will be needed later to compile mod_mirrorbrain.

It is useful to apply the following patch to mod_form.c:

Tue Mar 13 15:16:30 CET 2007 - poeml@cmdline.net

preserve r->args (apr_strtok is destructive in this regard). Makes
mod_autoindex work again in conjunction with directories where FormGET is
enabled.

--- mod_form.c.old      2007-03-13 15:05:13.872945000 +0100
+++ mod_form.c  2007-03-13 15:06:26.378367000 +0100
@@ -61,6 +61,7 @@
   char* pair ;
   char* last = NULL ;
   char* eq ;
+  char* a ;
   if ( ! ctx ) {
     ctx = apr_pcalloc(r->pool, sizeof(form_ctx)) ;
     ctx->delim = delim[0];
@@ -69,7 +70,8 @@
   if ( ! ctx->vars ) {
     ctx->vars = apr_table_make(r->pool, 10) ;
   }
-  for ( pair = apr_strtok(args, delim, &last) ; pair ;
+  a = apr_pstrdup(r->pool, args);
+  for ( pair = apr_strtok(a, delim, &last) ; pair ;
         pair = apr_strtok(NULL, delim, &last) ) {
     for (eq = pair ; *eq ; ++eq)
       if ( *eq == '+' )

mod_mirrorbrain

The main Apache module, mod_mirrorbrain, can be built with the following steps:

# unpack the tarball and go inside the source tree
cd mod_mirrorbrain
apxs -c -lm mod_mirrorbrain.c

To install the module in the right place, you would normally call:

apxs -i mod_mirrorbrain.c

Building, installing and activation can typically be combined in one apxs call:

apxs -cia -lm mod_mirrorbrain.c

mod_autoindex_mb

Build and install mod_autoindex_mb:

# in mirrorbrain source tree
cd mod_autoindex_mb
apxs -cia mod_autoindex_mb.c

mod_geoip

Install the GeoIP library, the accompanying commandline tools, and the geoip Apache module.

Configure mod_geoip:

GeoIPEnable On
GeoIPOutput Env
GeoIPDBFile /var/lib/GeoIP/GeoIP.dat MMapCache

(You would typically put this into the server-wide context of a virtual host.)

Note that a caching mode like MMapCache needs to be used, when Apache runs with the worker MPM. See http://forum.maxmind.com/viewtopic.php?p=2078 for more information.

You need to build two commandline tools for GeoIP:

cd tools
gcc -Wall -o geoiplookup_continent geoiplookup_continent.c -lGeoIP
gcc -Wall -o geoiplookup_city geoiplookup_city.c -lGeoIP

Installing Python and Perl modules

Install the following Python modules:

• python-cmdln python-SQLObject python-FormEncode python-psycopg2

Install a few Perl modules as well (required for the mirror scanner, which is written in Perl):

• perl-Config-IniFiles perl-libwww-perl perl-DBD-Pg perl-TimeDate

• perl-Digest-MD4 (it is not really needed, but prevents an ugly error message)

Installing PostgreSQL

Install the PostgreSQL server, start it and create a user and a database:

su - postgres
postgres@powerpc:~> createuser -P mirrorbrain
postgres@powerpc:~> createdb -O mirrorbrain mirrorbrain
postgres@powerpc:~> createlang plpgsql mirrorbrain

Maybe it is a good idea to check PostgreSQL’s access policy configuration at this point. The default should already be fine for local access via password. But you can add access from a remote host if needed, as shown in the bottom line:

postgres@powerpc:~> cp data/pg_hba.conf data/pg_hba.conf.orig
postgres@powerpc:~> vi data/pg_hba.conf

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all         all                               password
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          password
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all         all         ::1/128               password
# remote connections:
host    mirrorbrain mirrorbrain 10.10.2.3/32          md5

Note

I recommend to use password or md5 authentication in all lines. Remove ident; it is not so handy, at least not if you aren’t always the same user. password is transmitting in clear text, so one should use md5 for all remote connections.

If you plan to use mod_asn for lookup of AS (autonomous system) data, now’s the moment to install the ip4r data type into PostgreSQL. See the mod_asn documentation for instructions.

Creating database schema

Import the table structure and initial data:

psql -U mirrorbrain -f sql/schema-postgresql.sql mirrorbrain
psql -U mirrorbrain -f sql/initialdata-postgresql.sql mirrorbrain

Creating a “mirrorbrain” user and group

Create a “mirrorbrain” user and group:

groupadd -r mirrorbrain
useradd -r -g mirrorbrain -s /bin/bash -c "MirrorBrain user" -d /home/mirrorbrain mirrorbrain

Installation of the tools

You need to install a number of the provided tools to a location in your $PATH. Unfortunately, there is no Makefile to take this work off you. Hopefully, one can be provided later:

install -m 755 tools/geoiplookup_continent /usr/bin/geoiplookup_continent
install -m 755 tools/geoiplookup_city      /usr/bin/geoiplookup_city
install -m 755 tools/geoip-lite-update     /usr/bin/geoip-lite-update
install -m 755 tools/null-rsync            /usr/bin/null-rsync
install -m 755 tools/scanner.pl            /usr/bin/scanner
install -m 755 mirrorprobe/mirrorprobe.py  /usr/bin/mirrorprobe

The following command should build and install the mb admin tool:

setup.py install [--prefix=...]

Configuring Apache

Load the Apache modules:

a2enmod form
a2enmod geoip
a2enmod dbd
a2enmod mirrorbrain

Configure the database adapter (mod_dbd), resp. its connection pool. Put the configuration into server-wide context. Config example:

# for prefork, this configuration is inactive. prefork simply uses 1
# connection per child.
<IfModule !prefork.c>
        DBDMin  0
        DBDMax  32
        DBDKeep 4
        DBDExptime 10
</IfModule>

Configure the database driver. Put the following configuration into server-wide OR vhost context. Make the file chmod 0640, owned root:root because it will contain the database password:

DBDriver pgsql
# note that the connection string (which is passed straight through to
# PGconnectdb in this case) looks slightly different - pass vs. password
DBDParams "host=localhost user=mirrorbrain password=12345 dbname=mirrorbrain connect_timeout=15"

Note

The database connection string must be unique per virtual host. This matters if several MirrorBrain instances are set up in one Apache. If the database connection string is identical in different virtual hosts, mod_dbd may fail to associate the connection string with the correct virtual host. A possible workaround is to use differing values in connect_timeout.

Next steps

From here, follow on with Initial configuration steps on all platforms.