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The 2008 ESIP Federation Workshop

15 July 2008

These presentations were given as part of the Hyrax installation and customization workshop at the 10-year anniversary meeting of the ESIP (Earth Science Information Partners) Federation. The workshop was a combination of lecture/presentation and hands-on use of Hyrax. Attendees were given a virtual machine on a CD-ROM that contained a complete development environment along with the Hyrax data server, already built and installed, and some open-source clients that can be used to read data from the server. Included here are the presentations and the CD-ROM image.

Presentations

Hyrax Setup: Background information on Hyrax and using the Virtual Machine.

BES Extensibility: Writing a new handler for CSV data and other ways, besides new formats, that the BES can be extended.

Running Hyrax in a Virtual Machine

Download the ISO and burn it to a CD-ROM or mount it so that you can copy files from the disk/iso-image (e.g., in Linux you'd 'type mount -t iso9660 -o loop <iso filename> /mnt/disk'). Copy the 'opendap_vm' and the 'slax-5.1.6-opendap.iso' directory and file to your hard drive. For Windows XP or Vista, make a new directory 'SLAX' on your C drive, for linux or OS/X, just copy the directory and file to the Desktop. For Windows XP/Vista, start VMware Player and open the 'opendap_vm' virtual machine found in the directory of the same name that you just copied. For Linux or OS/X, use a text editor to open the 'opendap_vm.vmx' file and edit the path to the 'slax-5.1.6-opendap.iso' so that it matches the location of that file on your computer. Then start the virtual machine.

To run the virtual machine, you need to download a copy of VMware Player (free) or Workstation (pay ware; 30-day evaluation period) for Windows XP or Vista or VMware Fusion (pay ware; 30-day eval available) for Intel Mac.

The workshop virtual machine ISO is at OPeNDAP Tutorial 2.0. The size is around 645MB.

It is also possible to bypass the Virtual Machine by downloading the software, setting up build and development environment and then compiling from sources.

What's included on the VM:

  • KDE desktop; Firefox
  • A development environment including make, gcc, g++, g77, bison, flex, ANTLR, et cetera.
  • Libraries: readline, curl
  • Web servers:
    • Apache 2.2.x
    • Tomcat 5.5.12
  • Ant 1.7
  • JDK 1.5
  • OPeNDAP DAP Sources (All of these compiled and installed in the order listed):
    • libdap 3.8.2
    • libnc-dap 3.7.0
    • bes 3.6.2
    • dap-server 3.8.5
    • netcdf_handler 3.7.9
    • freeform_handler 3.7.9
  • OPenDAP Java binaries:
    • ODC plus a hand tooled install and script for starting it
    • olfs-1.4.1 (java binary; olfs webapps .jar is in Tomcat's webapps directory)
  • Other sources:
    • netcdf 3.6.2 - you need to build and install this before building the netcdf handler above
    • nco 3.9.2 - you need to build and install this after building the libnc-dap code above; left as an exercise

This VM is based on one used for both the APAC and BOM workshops held in Australia in October 2007, so it contained some things that are targeted at the BOM System Admin and Developer Workshops and are not completely relevant to the ESIP workshop. For example, it contains a fair amount of client software although the main focus of the ESIP workshop is Hyrax and the customization of the BES. Still the clients make the VM useful and flexible. However, the Hyrax source code and binaries are updated to Hyrax's 1.4.2 release (June 2008).