Sun Microsystems iPlanet Web Server, Installation Manual

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Other Technical Requirements
Chapter 1 Before You Install iPlanet Web Server, FastTrack Edition 15
In addition, the user account you create for the server should belong to a group
that contains the server users for all iPlanet servers so that multiple servers can
have access to shared files.
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
).
Windows NT User Accounts for the Server
You should create a Windows NT user account for your iPlanet Web Server. It
should have restricted access to your system resources and run under a
nonprivileged system user account (one that has a limited set of system
permissions to your system). When the server starts, it runs with this user account.
Any server extension modules the server uses are created with this user account as
the owner.
NOTE It’s strongly recommended that you use a dedicated account for the
server.
CAUTION If you plan to use SNMP, you must run both the iPlanet Web Server
instance and the Administration Server as
root
.