We have put a lot of effort into making the package installs Just Work, so we hope that you can skip this section and move straight on to the web-based install and setup process described in the next chapter, Chapter 6, Creating The Initial WACS Databases. However if you have an unusual installation environment, the following section details the various things you need to do to get the installer working. You may need this if you are in an environment using external authentication (like LDAP or Active Directory), or other oddities that cause the package scripts not to work.
In addition to appearing there, the manual initial database creation
process documentation can be found in the text file
README.database in the WACS installation tree.
This installation tree is usually
/usr/share/wacs.
However, before we proceed to the initialisation step, it is important to ensure that your own user account has the requisite access rights to make use of the WACS software installation itself. You do not need to do this if you plan on accessing the software solely via the web interfaces. As a user that's probably OK, as an administrator maybe slightly less so as there are some problem resolution and similar tasks that still need to be carried out via a command prompt.
The normal action of the RPM/DEB packages is to create a user account
to hold all the datafiles, typically called simply wacs.
Unless you choose to do otherwise, the images and video clips loaded into
the WACS system are normally stored in the home directory of this account.
For obvious reasons, the security on all the Wacs directories are locked
down pretty hard, so you will need to pay attention to it. A new group
also called wacs is created and initially the wacs
and web server owner account are added to this. If you wish to read the
documentation, samples and configuration files without always having to
become the superuser first, you can simply add your own username to the
wacs group.
There are a number of ways to do this including using the
System->Administration->Users and Groups option or
you can do it in the shell as root with the usermod command. Since
the interface on Users and Groups GUI is very different between different
distributions and versions, we're going to stick with the command line
method as that is portable.
To do this you use the usermod command if you're using a superuser shell,
substituting the your_username with your user
name:
# usermod -a -G wacs your_username
#
If you're using Ubuntu you can also do it directly using the sudo command:
# sudo usermod -a -G wacsyour_username[sudo] password foryour_name: #
![[Warning]](images/warning.png) | Warning |
|---|---|
After you've added yourself to the wacs group, the change will almost certainly not take place within the current session. You will have to log out and log back in again for your membership to be recognised. The groups command lists the groups you are currently in; when this list includes wacs, things should be working - when it does not, they won't be! |