Forum OpenACS Development: OpenACS on VMTN

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1: OpenACS on VMTN
Posted by John Sequeira on 01/05/06 06:34 PM
I upgraded my Virtual Machine distribution of OpenACS + .LRN and it's now linked to from VMWare's ready-to-run virtual machine gallery.

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/vm/community.html

Probably most people realize that VMWare has create an app called the "Player" which is free and runs on Windows+Linux. I haven't used it yet, but heard it works fine because it's basically the workstation product with some buttons removed.

So now the price is right if you don't want to do system administration when evaluating openacs etc.

Anyway, if you're too lazy to apt-get, download away.

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2: Re: OpenACS on VMTN (response to 1)
Posted by Pavel Boghita on 01/05/06 11:01 PM
thanks for that. VMplayer is exactly what I needed. I have just installed it and works very well.
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3: Re: Re: OpenACS on VMTN (response to 2)
Posted by Wolfgang Baron on 01/19/06 10:44 PM
I just try to use it, because it seemed to be a nice way to have a look at OpenACS.

Unfortunately, the only reply I get on both ports 8000 and 8080 is, that 'OpenACS could not allocate a handle from database pool "pool2"' and I should correctly install a database driver and configure AOLServer to use it.

What a pitty. I thought, this thing should work and help get new users aboard?

Please tell me, how to get this thing running and where to find some concise documentation how work with the VMTN installed OpenACS.

Thanks for your time!

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4: Re: OpenACS on VMTN (response to 1)
Posted by Alfred Essa on 01/20/06 02:16 AM
I also received the same error. I am running the regular version of VMworkstation.
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5: Re: Re: OpenACS on VMTN (response to 4)
Posted by John Sequeira on 01/20/06 03:22 PM
My apologies Al and Wolfgang. I upgraded the virtual hardware to 5.5 right before VMNT posting and it seems to have confused postgresql and/or AOLServer.

I've got it fixed, but I did several things quickly and non-methodically so I have to test some more to make sure it'll work when others download it (and the IP address changes).

I'll try to get to this today. If any other OpenACS'r would like to help out (by downloading the VM and critiquing it) I would really appreciate it.

[As an aside, since I'm getting about 15-20 downloads/day (~500/mo, 6K/yr), I suspect I've become the main channel for new people finding out about OpenACS and dotLRN (correct me if I'm wrong). ]

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6: Re: Re: Re: OpenACS on VMTN (response to 5)
Posted by John Sequeira on 01/20/06 09:23 PM
Ah -- this one turned out to be subtle.

When the VM boots up, aolserver was starting before postgres, and so couldn't connect.

The services just need to be restarted for you to have a working site. 

svc /service/openacs5 -d
svc /service/openacs5 -u

and 

svc /service/dotlrn -d
svc /service/dotlrn -u

Once you do that, just suspend your machine between uses and the boot bug won't strike. To address the issue, I've added (and you can add) the following code to the daemontools run script (/service/openacs5/run and /service/dotlrn/run) to wait until postgresql is alive: 


#!/bin/sh
pid=`pidof -s postmaster` 
while !([ $pid ] && /etc/init.d/postgresql status > /dev/null 2>&1) 
do
        pid=`pidof -s postmaster`
        sleep 1
done

So you could also redownload the VM and not have the issue. I'm not sure why this hasn't been a problem in the past...

Sorry for the snafu ... you really are close to having working openacs/dotlrn instances. Promise.