Installation guide

Other Technical Requirements
Chapter 1 Before You Install iPlanet Web Server, Enterprise Edition 15
For example, you might call the server my_server.my_company.com and then use an alias
like
www.my_company.com. So the URLs to documents on your server would always use
the www alias instead of my_server.
Unix and Linux User Accounts for the Server
When the iPlanet Web Server starts, it runs with a Unix or Linux user account that you
specify during installation. Any child processes of the server are created with this account
as the owner. It is best to create a Unix or Linux account for the server that has restricted
access to your system resources. The account needs read permissions for the configuration
files and write permissions for the
logs directory. For security reasons, the user account
shouldn’t have write permissions to some of the configuration files, though some, such as
the access control files, should be group writable.
If you don’t create a dedicated user account for iPlanet Web Server, on many platforms you
can use the account with the name
nobody, but you might not want to give the user nobody
permissions for running the iPlanet Web Server. In addition, the user
nobody might not
work on some systems. Some systems assign a user ID of -2 for the user
nobody. A user ID
of less than 0 generates an error during installation. Check the
/etc/passwd file to see if
the
uid for nobody exists, and make sure it is greater than 0.
The Administration Server can also run with a user account that has write permissions to the
configuration files for all installed servers. However, it’s much easier to run the
Administration Server as
root because then the Administration Server user can start and
stop servers with port numbers less than 1024. (Port numbers greater than 1024 can be
started by any user).
The user you use to run the iPlanet Web Server (often
nobody) must be in the same group
as the user you use to run the Administration Server (often
root).
NOTE
DNS names should start with a letter, not a number.
NOTE
It’s strongly recommended that you use a dedicated account for the server.
NOTE
When changing the server user, remove any /tmp/lock.* files created in the
/tmp directory.