[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] staff clients and virtual images, was Re: forum?

[Jason Etheridge]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:52 AM, Nuku Ameyibor <nayibor at gmail.com> wrote:
> i have another question though
> hello everyone .i just installed the evergreen debian virtual image .i
> tried unsueccsusefly to run it on macox but it wasnt working.i now
> have it  installed and running using  the vmware fusion on my mac. the
> problem  is that i need a staff client  for staff to be able to use
> the staff version.the   openils.org site says that  the virtual image
> doesnt work with the staff client.does anybody  have any ideas or
> suggestions about  how i can run this??

First thing to determine is whether the image is accessible outside of
itself.  The most recent ones (the VirtualBox ones) definitely are.
That means you can point an external web browser to the image's OPAC
and get results.  If this isn't the case, then you may be able to
reconfigure the image and the virtualization software running the
image so that it is, or, you could run a staff client from within the
image.

Assuming external access is possible, then you could take a stock
version of the staff client, matching the major release of the EG
instance on the image (for example, 1.2.x or 1.4.x), and _force_ the
image to support it by setting up a specific symbolic link.

For example, let's assume you have a very old vmware image for
Evergreen, perhaps this:
"Server, VMWare image, 1.2.1.4 on Ubuntu 7.10"

And the latest "1.2" staff client available for download is for
1.2.4.0.  These will not work with each other out of the box.

What you can do is install the client, run it, and on the login
screen, press the "About this client..." button.  On the screen that
pops up, look for the text following "Target Server ID:".  In this
case, it is "rel_1_2_4_0".

So what is needed is for the server to have a directory or a symbolic
link named rel_1_2_4_0, that happens to point to a directory
containing remote files for the staff client.  For all of these
images, you should be able to find what you're needing in the
directory /openils/var/web/xul/.

So, in the image, from the command-line (in a terminal window), as the
Linux user "opensrf", you can enter these commands:

cd /openils/var/web/xul/
ls -l

And look to see what "versions" of the staff client are supported.  In
this case, there should be a directory named "rel_1_2_1_4".

What you would need to do this is create a link to rel_1_2_1_4 from
rel_1_2_4_0.  Do this by entering:

ln -s rel_1_2_1_4 rel_1_2_4_0

Then, if you restart your staff client and point it the IP address for
your server image, it should be supported.

I think it's likely that future images will come already bundled with
an appropriate staff client for download, and not require you to
download a client from the Internet.

Let me know if this helps!

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com