H-Sphere Sysadmin Guide

Urchin4 & Urchin5 Installation for Unix
(version 2.3.1 and higher)

 

Urchin Web Analytics software provides detailed metrics about a website's visitor activity. It is essential for anyone interested in the marketing, design or success of a website. Urchin is 100% browser-based admin system allowing to easily manage user access levels, groups, and affiliations. Urchin4 and 5 produces usage reports in HTML format for viewing with a standard web browser, reporting for up to 100 sites included in base license (comparing to 25 for Urchin 3). It reports in 10 languages with all reports generated on-the-fly and exportable to Excel or other formats. Read more about Urchin at www.urchin.com.

Supported Servers

Urchin4 and 5 can be installed on any H-Sphere *nix server. It doesn't require any special configuration and, once installed, can poll statistics from all web servers and winboxes. To ensure that statistics is properly collected by Urchin 4 and Urchin5, polled winboxes must be no older than 2.3.1.

Compatibility With Urchin 3

Urchin4 and Urchin5 are not interchangeable with Urchin3. H-Sphere has no migration tool to move statistics from Urchin 3 to the later versions. For migration, use standard utilities provided by Urchin.

If you don't use Urchin 3 on some web servers, we recommend that you disable it in Global Resources.

Urchin Lisence Manager is to be used only for Urchin 3. Urchin4 and 5 are managed without it.

Installation Procedure

To install Urchin 4 or Urchin 5 on Unix-type systems, do the following:

  1. Go to www.urchin.com and click the Download link.
  2. Select the installer that most closely matches your platform. The name of the installer will include the Urchin version and the operating system type (e.g. urchin4100_redhat6x.sh).
    Note: If necessary, upload the installer to a temporary location on the system on which you are installing Urchin. If you are not on the console, telnet (or use ssh if available) to the system and cd to the directory where the installer is located.
  3. From the command line type in the name of the installer. For example:
    ./urchin4100_redhat7x.sh
    This will unpack several files that comprise the installation kit.
  4. From the command line execute the main installation script by typing:
    ./install.sh
    The script will prompt you for input as needed; just follow the instructions.
  5. Following the instructions of the manual, configure Urchin in the directory:
    /hsphere/local/urchin
    Note: Urchin port and owner can be set by default (9999, nobody).
  6. Create directory /hsphere/local/urchin/var/logs by running:
    mkdir /hsphere/local/urchin/var/logs
  7. Set directory owner the same as for Urchin on step 5:
    chown nobody:nobody /hsphere/local/urchin/var/logs
  8. Important: Make steps 8-9 on all webboxes.
  9. Create file loglist in the /hsphere/local/sqwebmail/cgi-bin/ directory:
    touch loglist
  10. Change httpd owner by running:
    chown httpd:httpd loglist
  11. In the hsphere.properties file, configure the following variables:
    URCHIN_SERVER_ID = [URCHIN_SERVER_ID]
    URCHIN_PORT = [URCHIN_PORT]
    URCHIN_SCHEDULER_START = [URCHIN_SCHEDULER_START]
    URCHIN_SCHEDULER_FINISH = [SCHEDULER_FINISH]
    URCHIN_PROTOCOL = [URCHIN_PROTOCOL]
    URCHIN_SERVERNAME = [URCHIN_SERVERNAME]
    Where:
    [URCHIN_SERVER_ID] is the ID of the logical server where Urchin is installed. You can get the logical server id in E.Manager;
    [URCHIN_PORT] is the port taken by Urchin;
  12. [URCHIN_SCHEDULER_START] and [URCHIN_SCHEDULER_FINISH] are the hours when statistics is collected. e.g: 2 and 4 means statistics will be collected between 2 and 4 AM;
    [URCHIN_PROTOCOL] the protocol to connect to the Urchin control panel, can be http or https. The default is http;
    [URCHIN_SERVERNAME] (since 2.3.1 patch 9) is the URL to the Urchin server; it should be set in addition to URCHIN_SERVER_ID on systems with NAT support (the Urchin server in this case has a local IP). In other cases, you should comment out or skip setting this parameter.
  13. This step is only for H-Sphere 2.3.1 Patch 2 or older. If you are installing Urchin 5, symlink logs/ to log/:
    cd /hsphere/local/urchin/var
    ln -s logs/ log
    This isn't necessary for later versions of H-Sphere.
  14. Restart HSphere for changes to take effect.

 



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