Cradle Installation Accounts

Some users have experienced difficulties installing Cradle onto their systems. In nearly all cases, these problems result from not using our recommended UNIX or Windows login account when installing.

The login accounts that we recommend are sometimes held by a small group of IT personnel, who may be difficult to contact or who may work for a subcontractor so that their time is chargeable. In such cases, it is tempting to try an alternative login account to perform the installations.

All that we can say in such situations is that:

• Not using a recommended login account to install is intrinsically risky. It may work, depending on how your organisation has configured the access rights of its machines, but it is much more likely to fail than it is to succeed.
• It takes longer, often much longer, to reverse an installation that has failed by not being run using a recommended login account than it takes to wait for personnel who have the passwords to the recommended login accounts

UNIX

All UNIX installations must be run as root. Although you can bypass this ,we do not recommend using any such approach.

Access as root is needed because the installation:

1. May be accessing tape or CD devices which may have been protected
2. May be installing into a directory that is not normally accessible
3. May be augmenting system directories (such as /usr/lib/X11/fonts or /usr/man) that are not normally accessible
4. Will be changing the owner and group of Cradle installation files
5. Will enable setuid-on-execute for the Cradle servers as the default
6. May be augmenting the .cshrc or .profile files of user accounts
7. May be defining or adjusting system print queues

Windows

All Windows installations must be run as local Administrator, that is, logged-in as the Windows user Administrator and with the domain set to the local PC, and not the network. On Windows 95 and 98 and similar operating systems where login is optional, do not bypass the login if an option to login is provided. That is, if there is a login screen, always use it.

All Windows installations must be run as local Administrator. After the reboot, the next login must also be as local Administrator.

Access as local Administrator is needed because the installation:

1. May be accessing tape or CD devices which may have been protected
2. May be installing into a directory that is not normally accessible
3. Will augment the system32 directory (for Document Publisher VBA files) which is always protected
4. Will launch Xvision and NutCracker installations whose contents must be installed as local Administrator
5. Will be creating or updating Windows services to install or update the Cradle Services Manager (CSM)
6. Will add keys to the registry
7. Will update system environment variables such as PATH