NOTE: Please ask support questions, whether or not they relate to WindowsInstallCookbook, over on Support.AskedQuestions where they are less likely to be missed.

(Refactored discussion about other ways of doing Windows install to WindowsInstallAlternatives.) --RD

Moved ChrisWolske's question to Support.InstallDigestSHA1Fails

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Jun 2002

I haven't gotten Twiki up yet (just a test environment on a Win98 desktop), but here are comments about things I did run into:

• I found it easier to keep one browser window open with the WindowsInstallCookbook instructions, while opening others to get to Apache, etc. That way I could easily refer back to the instructions without losing stuff on other pages.
• Using "Internet Explorer" for download settings in Cygwin install seemed more robust.
• I found that clicking away from the Cygwin window during downloads would interrupt the transfer, so I just practiced patience.
• I originally had a space in my user name, which fouled up CPAN when it tried to copy files into my $HOME directory (evidently it doesn't double-quote directory names).
• CPAN was (I think) sending the wrong parameters to ncftpget, which resulted in ncftpget doing the "less" command on its help, which left me with a screen full of help with a colon at the bottom. I finally figured out that typing 'q' would get me out of it. Because "less" removed all previous output from the screen, it was hard to monitor what was going on. I reimaged my disk and reinstalled CPAN without ncftpget (by typing a space after the ncftpget prompt in the CPAN self-install). It looks like CPAN ended up using wget to get the files.

I'm currently stuck with CPAN uppercasing my "install" request. When I do "install Net::SMTP" it downloads a bunch of stuff and then says it can't find NET::SMTP. If I do "i NET::SMTP" it shows me the lower-case version. I realize this is a CPAN issue (so I'm not filing a TWiki bug yet), but if anyone can point me at some CPAN resources I'll do some more poking around. I couldn't find help on CPAN itself on www.cpan.org.

I created a shell script to handle most of the commands that need to be typed in. I don't quite know where it would go in the TWiki web, but if someone could give me a hint I'd be happy to put it into the right place.

-- ChrisKeith - 30 Jun 2002

Thanks for the feedback - suspect the upper casing from CPAN is a Win98 issue as I have not seen this on Win2000. The shell script looks very interesting - would be best if you renamed it to a .txt on your web server as the .html suffix causes the <...> parts to be stripped out.

-- RichardDonkin - 01 Jul 2002

The txt version is now up there.

-- ChrisKeith - 01 Jul 2002

I'm getting closer. I got past the problem above by following the suggestion from CPAN:

  There's a new CPAN.pm version (v1.61) available!
  [Current version is v1.59_54]
  You might want to try
    install Bundle::CPAN
    reload cpan
  without quitting the current session. It should be a seamless upgrade
  while we are running...

Perhaps there's a problem with 1.59_54. After installing 1.61 (BEFORE installing anything else) I was able to proceed. I can now see the TWiki main page and it looks like rcs is working (I get a diff when clicking on a ">-" link). However, I get the following in the testenv page:

$mailProgram: /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -oi -oeq 
 Note: This is the mail program TWiki uses to send mail. 
 Warning: Mail program /usr/sbin/sendmail not found. Check the path. 

I have put the latest version of my script up, and I believe it's now correct in what it does.

-- ChrisKeith - 05 Jul 2002

Was the testenv message from the new version? In any case, it doesn't matter on Windows since TWiki will always use Net::SMTP (assuming this has been installed, as it should be). Try downloading CVSget:bin/testenv - this should avoid this message.

-- RichardDonkin - 06 Jul 2002

I had to change SMTPMAILHOST in the bin/view/TWiki/TWikiPreferences page to get past this problem. I set it to the SMTP host that my mail program is set to (as opposed to "mail"). I was then able to register a new user (without getting any error messages), although I never did get any mail about it. I then went on and successfully did most of the other tests in the WindowsInstallCookbook page, but I'm unclear about two points:

• When you say "Re-edit same page", do you mean "try to edit the same page from two different browsers"? Is the assumption that the first will do an rcs lock on the page and the second should get an error?
• Which TWiki page contains the instructions about uploading binary files?

I'm going to continue to dig on the SMTP problem (to see if I can get my mail). Are there any good introductions to SMTP that anyone knows about (that talk about its use in the real world...)?

-- ChrisKeith - 15 Jul 2002

I've updated the re-edit part to be clearer, should say separate browser or PC, aim is to test locking as you say. As for uploading binary files, the text refers to the Installing Cygwin section of this page.

Re SMTP, you might want to use the TWikiAlphaRelease, as I applied a fix there for some mailers that require an extra header. But see the mail logs on your mailer (e.g. sendmail), and make sure you have a correct From header (which will be based on the TWiki webmaster setting) so you get a bounce message back.

-- RichardDonkin - 15 Jul 2002

Well, I'm up. Or rather, my Twiki is fully up (but that makes me "up" :). I changed the webmaster setting as you recommended and the notification mail comes through like gangbusters. I uploaded a JPG file to test the binary upload and it worked fine. I had one more glitch - when I tried editing the same page from multiple machines, I didn't get any lock message, which I figured was because I was TWikiGuest in both places. I followed the instructions in TWikiDocumentation (using Windows-style "c:/Twiki" paths) titled "Enabling Authentication of Users" so I could log in as two different users. Is there any way to log in (as non-twiki guest) without having set up passwords? If there is, it might be nice to tell how to do that explicitly in the instructions. Now I'm going to try the whole process again on a Win2000 machine to validate that my script works over there also, then call it a day (or a week or a month). Thanks for your help, Richard.

-- ChrisKeith - 20 Jul 2002

Probably your local mailer requires a valid From address that is within your domain, so when that was set to something arbitrary the mailer bounced the email, and of course had nowhere valid to bounce it to.

As for authentication - you need to set up passwords for each user by default. Options for not using passwords are discussed at ForgettingPasswords, and there's also some stuff about NTLM authentication near the end of the WindowsInstallCookbook itself.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Jul 2002

(Question moved to WindowsInstallProblems)