Table of Contents
Before we even start to install the WACS package, it is very important that we make sure the host candidate system is prepared for the task in hand. To do this, we need to ensure a number of things have been prepared beforehand:
- ensure adequate system resources
- assign and configure for static host name
- review security and access policies
The first of these steps, ensuring adequate system resources, basically involves looking at the sort of material you're intending to store in the WACS system and approximately what the storage requirements will be. If you are looking at holding sets for maybe fifty models who come from a site that specialises in high-resolution images and HD video clips, you may find that an average image set is upwards of 100MB, and an average video clip maybe 500-600MB. If each model has an average of four video clips and 10 sets, then you're looking at probably 3GB per model, and would need to allocate around 150GB of storage, which with margins for future expansions means about 200-250GB to start off with.
Do remember that on most Linux systems you can use tools like the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to ease the process of disc space allocation and in particular future expansion when live data is present. It is also perfectly possible to use Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices as the primary storage location for WACS collections.
You also need to make sure you assign a static IP address and hostname to the server system; more details on this and the use of NAS servers is given in the configuration guide. There are also a number of resources on the net to help you through this process; one that appears fairly complete is this one at howtoforge.com .
![[Warning]](images/warning.png) | Warning |
|---|---|
WACS is not currently compatible with the SELinux enhanced security system - this needs to be reduced to either permissive or switched off entirely (disabled) for WACS to work. This will affect Fedora and other RedHat-based distributions. It was our intention to resolve this issue in the 0.9.x release series of WACS but it now looks likely that we will not be able to fully address this until the 1.0.x release series. |
If you're running Fedora (or any other distribution) with SELinux enabled, you will run into problems. WACS does not currently work well with SELinux and you have a choice of either setting it to permissive mode (where it logs problems but does not block things from working) or disabling it entirely. If you disable it entirely, it is much harder to go back to running it later as software updates and the like to not get their SELinux attributes updated. On the other hand, permissive mode will fill up your log file areas and may slow down system operation somewhat.
If you are using either the RPM/DEB packages of the WACS applications, or the easyinstall script, and are using the default applications (MySQL in particular), the prerequisite applications will be automatically installed if they are not already present. If not, or you are using a different database (Oracle, or another like PostGres SQL), you will need to install these applications first as detailed in the table below and then follow the manual install steps:
Table 2.1. Software Pre-Requisites For WACS On Linux
| Service | Application | Version | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web Server | Apache | > 2.0 | main route of access |
| Database | MySQL | > 5.0 | backend database engine |
| Oracle | > 10g | alternative database engine | |
| Perl | Langauge | > 5.8.0 | Langauge interpreter (required) |
| Php | Language | > 5 | Language interpreter (optional) |
| Perl::DBI | Library | any recent | Database interface library |
| Perl::DBD | Driver | for Database | Database driver routine for MySQL or Oracle |
| XML::Simple | Library | any recent | Parsers for eXtensible Markup Langauge (XML) files |
| Data::Dumper | Library | any recent | Essential debugging tool |
| File::Basename | Library | any recent | Filename manipulation routines |
| MIME::Base64 | Library | any recent | Binary data encoder used with XML files |
| netpbm | Converter | any recent | Image format conversion tools |
| Image::Exiftool | Library | any recent | Image/Video identification |
| ffmpegthumbnailer | Converter | any recent | Video thumbnailer |
![[Note]](images/note.png) | Note |
|---|---|
Since ffmpegthumbnailer uses various plugin codecs, not all of which are always enabled by default, you may need to include additional non-free repositories and install additional codecs to make sure it works for all the video types you intend to manage on the WACS system. In essence, if you find thumbnails are not being generated correctly for a given video file, use a standard player (mplayer, xine, etc) to determine which codecs are missing and install them. |