Planning for NCA

The following sections cover the issues that need to be resolved before starting the NCA service.

System Requirements for NCA

To support NCA, the system must meet these requirements:

• 256 Mbytes RAM must be installed.

• The Solaris 10, or 9 release, or one of the Solaris 8 upgrade releases must be installed.

• Support for a web server which has native support for NCA or a web server whose startup script has been modified to use the Socket Utility Library for NCA:

  • Apache web server, ships with Solaris 8 upgrade, Solaris 9, and Solaris 10 releases

  • Sun^TM Java System Web Server

  • Zeus web server available from Zeus Technology, http://www.zeus.com

This product is intended to be run on a dedicated web server. The running of other large processes on a server that runs NCA can cause problems.

NCA Logging

The NCA service can be configured to log web activity. Generally, NCA logging should be enabled if the web server logging is enabled.

Interpositioning Library for Daemon Support of the Door Server

Many web servers use AF_INET sockets. By default, NCA uses AF_NCA sockets. To correct this situation, an interpositioning library is provided. The new library is loaded in front of the standard socket library, libsocket.so. The library call bind() is interposed by the new library, ncad_addr.so. Suppose that the status is enabled in /etc/nca/ncakmod.conf. The version of Apache that is included with the Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 release is already set up to call this library. If you are using IWS or Netscape servers, see How to Load the Socket Utility Library for NCA to use the new library.

Multiple Instance Support

Systems that have NCA installed often need to run multiple instances of a web server. For instance, a single server might need to support a web server for outside access as well as a web administration server. To separate these servers, you would configure each server to use a separate port.