Before you get started...

At this point, you have probably been tasked with evaluating Razor, or worse someone dumped a CD ROM on your desk and said "here, install this!" Even if this doesn't describe your situation, we would like to make the evaluation process quick and painless. To that end, we'd like to share some advice that will save you time and aggravation down the road. Trust us, we've seen this happen all too often not to at least tell you

A suggested organization

We recommend that before proceeding, you create a dedicated Razor administration account. This will become the central location for all Razor distributions, license managers, databases, etc. While you can install Razor pretty much anywhere, like under a directory in your home account - we strongly recommend against it. We know what happens; you download the software, install it, play around with it for a while "kicking the tires," making some modifications to see just how powerful Razor is. Unless you are the system administrator, it is probably a hassle to get a separate account. Don't let your youthful enthusiasm cost you time down the road. With each modification you make, you will feel less and less like blowing it all away to reinstall/reconfigure the tool in a central location - the way it should have been done in the beginning.

Here is a reasonable organization...¹

                        /-- Razor - - - - - > Razor_<version>
                        |-- Razor_<version> 
/home/razoradm ---------+-- Razor_lm      
                        |                                                         
                        |                   /-- database1      
                        \-- razor_db -------+-- database2      
                                            \-- database3 

You can control access to software releases and the database files through permissions granted on this razoradm account. When future releases of Razor are issued, you will be really glad you set up a reasonable organization.

What you'll need to know

Here is some information you will need to know in order to install and create your first Razor database.

• The full path for the Razor release to be installed
• The full path for the Razor license directory²
• The full path for the Razor database³
• Which archival engine you will be using, Razor supports either SCCS or RCS⁴
• The name of your first version control group, if you will be using Razor for file version control

¹ Note that some of this structure is created for you during the installation; namely the Razor sumbolic link, Razor_lm, and Razor_<version> directories.
² Keep the license directory separate from the Razor release to avoid overwrites during product upgrades.
³ Again, we suggest this directory be kept separate (in parallel with) from the Razor release.
⁴ For a discussion of SCCS and RCS refer to "Which archive engine should I pick?" on page 339.