STARTS
Stanford Protocol Proposal for Internet Search and Retrieval

Reference Implementation

Installing and running the implementation

This page describes how to install the components of the reference implementation on your workstation and run them. The entire set of components have been tested and run on Solaris 2.5. Note that even though the Java parts of the implementation (most notably the StartsServer application) will run on any Java virtual machine, the freeWAIS parts of the implementation will run only on UNIX. Although not recommended, you can run these components on separate machines (e.g., an NT machine and a UNIX machine). Consult the testing notes for more information.

1. Installing the freeWAIS search engine
   • download the tar'ed freeWAIS binaries that have been compiled for Solaris 2.5.
   • create a new directory (which we'll call <freewais> here) and extract the tared files into that directory.
2. Installing the sample database
   • The index files
     • download the tar'ed source index files.
     • create a new directory (which we'll call <indexes> here) and extract the tar'ed files into that directory.
     • NOTE: the <indexes> directory will now contain the inverted index, catalog, dictionary, and ancillary files for each source (cstr and linux). The two files with the "fmt" suffix are the format files for each source, which allow the wais indexer to extract field information from the document source files (see the freeWAIS documentation for more information.)
   • The document files
     • download the tar'ed cstr document sources.
     • create a new directory (which we'll call <cstrdocs> here) and extract the tar'ed files into that directory.
     • download the tar'ed linux document sources.
     • create a new directory (which we'll call <linuxdocs> here) and extract the tar'ed files into that directory.
   • Modify the index files to point to the document files
     • open the two files cstr.cat and linux.cat in the <indexes> directory using your favorite text editor.
     • both files consist of headlines and DocID's for the set of documents in the source. Globally change the pathname for the documents to point to the respective file in either <cstrdoc> or <linuxdocs>. For example, Document #1 in the cstr collection has the pathname
       /home/lagoze/projects/starts/freewais/cstrdb/92-1260
       Change this to:
       <cstrdocs>/92-1260
     • NOTE: you could reindex the files to accomplish the same task, but this method is easier.
3. Installing the StartsServer application
   • download the tar'ed StartsServer application.
   • create a new directory (which we'll call it <server> here) and extract the tar'ed files into that directory.
   • modify StartsServer for your host.
     • open the file <server>/STARTSConfiguratin/ServerConfiguration.java in your favorite text editor.
     • change the initial value of the variable "hostName" to correspond to the host that your server will run on.
4. Installing the CGI script for interfacing between an HTTP server and StartsServer.
   • download the Perl CGI script
   • place the script in a directory that your HTTP server, from which you will be accessing StartsServer, has execute access to.
5. Installing the HTML input form for constructing STARTS requests.
   • download the HTML input form.
   • place the HTML file in a directory accessible from your HTTP server.
6. Running the components
   • Running freeWAIS
     • in the <freewais> directory run the executable waisserver with the arguments "-p 5000" (specifying port 5000) and "-d <indexes>" (specifying that the indexes are in the directory <indexes>)
   • Running StartsServer
     • in the <server> directory run the command "java Server".
     • StartsServer will then start up, issue messages has it pre-loaded document sources for both the cstr and linux source, and then listen on port 6789.
   • Make the CGI script accessible from your HTTP server
     • edit the "config" file for you HTTP server to execute the Perl CGI script (called nph-dienst.pl) when it receives URL's that look like /STARTS/*. In the NCSA server this means adding the following line to the httpd.conf file:
       Exec /STARTS/* <dir>/nph-starts.pl
       where <dir> is the directory in which the Perl CGI script is resident.
   • You can now access the reference implementation through your HTTP server. The easiest way to do this is to use the input form that you installed above.

Send questions to help@ncstrl.org