Server Installation

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•Login as root, or use "sudo -i" to become an interactive super user.

 

•Create a directory to hold the UnForm files, and change to that directory.

 

 Example:        

 umask 0

 mkdir /usr/unform90

 cd /usr/unform90

 

•Uncompress and extract UnForm from the download file.  If the uncompress program is not available, you can use gunzip instead.

 

 uncompress uf90_xxx_tar.Z (or gunzip uf90_xx_tar.Z)

 tar xvf uf90_xxx_tar

 

•Execute the UnForm set up script.

 

 ./ufsetup.sh

 

The ufsetup.sh script will create two scripts, called /usr/bin/uf90c and /usr/bin/uf90d.  The uf90c program is the client, while uf90d manages the server.

 

The setup script will offer to create the user 'unform', or if found, to run UnForm under that user.  If you choose not to run UnForm under that user, it will default to starting up as 'root', and you will need to edit the uf90d.ini file [apache] section to specify a different user under which to run the private Apache HTTP server instance (since that cannot run as root).

 

Note that earlier versions of UnForm defaulted to running as 'root', so if you migrate rule files and other files to version 9, you might need to adjust permissions to allow the 'unform' user to read and write those files.

 

The setup script will also look for an Apache web server in several common locations.  If it isn't found, you will be prompted for a location, both of the path to the httpd executable and also a directory where Apache modules reside.

 

If Apache is not installed on your Unix system, you must install it before installing UnForm.  Apache is normally present on any Linux or OSX system, but may or may not be present on AIX systems, though is readily available from IBM.

 

The setup script will test to see if the chkconfig program exists on the system (many modern Linux systems have this), and if so and the /etc/init.d/uf90d script does not exist, it will offer to install it.  This will enable automatic startup of the UnForm server at boot time, and the server can be controlled via the 'service' command line typically used to manage other services: 'service uf90d start', for example.

 

•Activate demo mode, or activate permanently, using ./license.sh.

 

•Start the server: uf90d start

 

•Run uf90c –v command to ensure UnForm is installed and set up correctly. The output from this command will display information about the installation.  Note that uf90c requires Perl version 5 or higher.

 

See the licensing chapter for activation information.

 

 

Automatic Startup

At any point, and certainly once live operations are enabled, you will want the UnForm server to start automatically when your system boots.  There are two ways to do this.

 

•Add a line to /etc/inittab to run uf90d start one time at all regular run levels
 

 uf90:2345:once:/usr/bin/uf90d start

 

 

•Create a script S99uf90d, and place this script in any /etc/rc#.d directory associated with normal run

levels (typically /etc/rc2.d, /etc/rc3.d, or /etc/rc5.d). It doesn't hurt to place the script in levels 2, 3,

and 5. The script can be as simple as:

 

 #!/bin/sh

 uf90d start

 

On some systems there is a pre-installed script called "/etc/init.d/rc.local" that runs at boot time.  You can place the line 'uf90d start' in this script.

 

On many Linux systems, you can use the chkconfig program to install the UnForm server as a service.  The file init.d.script contains comments that provide instructions for using this technique.  The ufsetup.sh script will normally prompt to perform this step automatically if chkconfig is available.

 

 

Shared Library Dependencies

Two optional features require access to shared libraries on Unix and Linux, to support SSL and Zlib compression.  These are loaded as libssl.so, libcrypto.so, and libz.so at runtime whenever they are required.  In rare cases, these generic names might not be defined in the system's lib directories.  If that is the case, then you can define symbolic links with these names to the correct local paths.

 

For example, if the installed and available name for libssl.so is /lib/libssl.so.0.9.8, you can create a symbolic link like this:

 

 ln -s /lib/libssl.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib/libssl.so

 

You will likely have the same requirement for the related libcrypto.so file:

 

 ln -s /lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so

 

Verify each of the three .so files are present or links to local versions: libssl.so, libcrypto.so, and libz.so.  Note that if UnForm is a 64-bit version, you will need to perform this step for 64-bit libraries, typically found in /usr/lib64.

 

 

AIX Runtime Dependency

UnForm 9.0 includes a barcode toolkit that relies on two library packages for AIX 5.3.  These libraries are upward compatible with later AIX releases, so maybe installed on those later versions.  You can obtain these libraries from this link:

 

https://unform.com/download/gcc-libs-3.3.2-AIX5.3.tar.gz

 

This tar file should be extracted from the root directory (cd /), as it contains relative paths starting with the top level /opt directory.