Installation instructions for ff-1.1:

Login as root!

Look at the top lines of the Makefile.  You may want to change the
installation directories or the owner of the files.

BIN_DIR specifies, where the executables ff and mk_ff are stored.
IDX_DIR specifies, where the config file and the databases are stored.
You may want this to point to a directory accessable by remote machines.
MAN_DIR is where the man pages are installed.

The search program ff is an suid program.  It is save to
set it to root but if you are paranoid, you may set it to any other
user.  In that case you should make sure that all database and
configuration files are owned by that user (set INST_OWNER appropriate).

The group of the files gives special privileges to its members: they may
see the whole contents of all database files.  Security policies have no
effect on them.

The given defaults should be ok for most linux systems.


Next: make install

This builds the executables, ff and mk_ff and installs them in BIN_DIR.
The IDX_DIR is created and a sample groups file and update script is
installed if not already present.  The man pages are copied to
MAN_DIR/man1 and MAN_DIR/man5.  The /etc/magic files is checked and
eventually an entry for ff-databases is added.
If you use a lessopen script, you should check the file lessopen.


Now you have to configure the package.

Cd to the IDX_DIR and edit update_ff.  Check the two variables FF and BIN.
They should point to IDX_DIR and BIN_DIR.  Next, look at the end of the file.
There are two sample entries (root.ff and dosc.ff).  Edit them as appropriate.
The database field gives the name of the database, the sec field the security
policy (should be 0 for databases that may used by everyone and 2 for
root and user filesystems). The exp field specifies an expire time in days
(0 means no expire). If you want inode-numbers in the database, set the
ino field to yes, else to no.  The comment fields describes the contents of
this database (surround it in quotes).  The misc field may be used to pass
additional options to mk_ff.  Normally, these are -i options to omit directories
(ie: -i/tmp -i/var/tmp).  The last field is a list of directories to put into
the database.

Now, test the update_ff script by entering:
    ./update_ff
After a while, the database files should be present.

Next check the group files.  Add the filesystems entered in update_ff to the
default group.  You can omit the .ff suffix.  You may expand this later (see
scripts/groups_sample).  You may type 'ff -l' to see how ff will interpret it.

Now its time to test the whole setup:
    ff termcap
    ff .sys

The last step: add update_ff to cron by entering
    crontab -e <owner_of_ff>
Add a line like
    30 4 * * * /var/spool/ff/update_ff
and exit.


If you want to create cdrom indexes: Mount the cdrom and enter
    mk_ff -bs0 -c"InfoMagic 0296-1" /cdrom >/var/spool/ff/im0296-1.ff
and add the new database im0296-1 to /var/spool/ff/groups.


Finally: Take a look at the man-pages ff(1), mk_ff(1), and ff_groups(5).
