lf310, Applications: A short guide to the installation of CVW under Linux

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A short guide to the installation of CVW under Linux

Abstract:

CVW (Collaborative Virtual Workspaces) is one of the finest open source tools available for the development of virtual education. This article describes the process of installation and running in Suse Linux Professional 8.0.

Further development on the original Cvw is not taking place at this moment but the software is currently beeing translated to Spanish and is of course used in the courses at Universidad Santiago de Cali in Colombia. As of the writing of this article there are about 600 users of Cvw at the university.

_________________ _________________ _________________

What is CVW?

CVW (cvw.sourceforge.net) is a collaboration software environment written mainly in Java, that provides a "virtual building" where teams can communicate, collaborate, and share information, regardless of their geographic location. With CVW the interactive possibilities of the net can be used in virtual spaces where the people gathers to learn, interact, discuss, share information, using a series of friendly tools. CVW has been developed by the Mitre Corporation and is completely Open Source.

Why we choose CVW?

The GIEV group at Universidad Santiago de Cali in Colombia, has been working for several years in researching new platforms and virtual environments that allow an easy integration with the existent education methods. After several testing of commercial software we began to look for in Open Source development and discovered CVW. It has all the main elements that we were looking for, so we decided to try.

CVW is not easy to install, as we soon discovered. In the next lines I'll describe the process to put running this wonderful platform on Suse 8.0.

We used an IBM Netvista machine to use as server for this software. The machine has a Pentium 4 at 2.0Ghz, 256MB Ram and 40G Harddrive, connected to the University network. The Suse installation went clean, only the video give me some trouble (an integrated Intel 845), but with a kernel compilation the video was soon running well (1024x768 at 24 bits).

Step by step

The first step is to download the software from the project website:

We need to get the following applications:

CVW server
CVW document server
CVW client

There is also the CVW Federated server available which applies only to a cluster of CVW servers.

First install the CVW server. We untarred the file in /opt/CVWserver and created an user to run it. The script to run the server is

./cvw.boot start

And to end the execution:

./cvw.boot stop

The software recommended to create an user, we created the user cvw and gave it the rights on the directory. When you look at the script file (cvw.boot) you must enter some data like the installation directory and, the most important, the TCP port where CVW will check for client connections. By default the assigned port is 8888. You only have to add it in the /etc/services script. The only thing that you must change when installing under Linux is the line that fixes the maximum number of clients, by default is unlimited, but in Linux this will cause the service to crash.

When you connect with a browser you will be greeted with the following message:

I don't understand that. Valid commands at this point are
Help, COnnect, or Quit

This means that our server is ready to serve any client. The second step (and the most painful) is to install the document server.

Untar it in /opt/cvwdocserver and look at the README file. Now it is time to make your first decission.

The CVW docserver uses Mysql as database and Tomcat (an Apache Java utility) to handle all documents stored in the virtual workspace. The tar.gz file includes a jakarta/tomcat directory and a complete mysql installation (3.23.27-beta)

We don't like beta versions and Suse had a newer jakarta and mysql versions that were running fairly well, so we decided to adjust it to the docserv requirements. With mysql there were no problems, we only move the database file to my existent installation (/var/lib/mysql).
The real problem came with the Tomcat configuration. Trying to adapt the existent jakarta to the configuration of CVW's tomcat was a headache, because the commands were located in different parts, so at least we decided to run the included Jakarta/Tomcat.

But you must change several thing in order to get a running application: we left the jakarta/tomcat directory under my docserv tree (/opt/cvwdocserv). In your apache configuration file (/etc/httpd/httpd.conf) you must add a line pointing it:

Include /opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/conf/tomcat-apache.conf

Now to the tomcat-apache.conf file. You have to give the exact address of the jserv module in apache

LoadModule jserv_module libexec/mod_jserv.so

Also you must indicate the correct address of your tomcat installation and the port to listen (my choice was 8007, after several trials):

ApJServDefaultPort 8007
AddType test/jsp .jsp
AddHandler jserv-servlet .jsp
Alias /examples /opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/examples
<Directory "/opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/examples">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>
ApJServMount /examples/servlet /examples
<Location /examples/WEB-INF/ >
AllowOverride None
deny from all
</Location>
Alias /test /opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/test
<Directory "/opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/test">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>
ApJServMount /examples/servlet /examples
<Location /examples/WEB-INF/ >
AllowOverride None
deny from all
</Location>
Alias /test /opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/test
<Directory "/opt/cvwdocserver/jakarta/tomcat/webapps/test">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>
ApJServMount /test/servlet /test
<Location /test/WEB-INF/ >
AllowOverride None
deny from all
</Location>
ApJServMount /servlet /ROOT

Once this is done, you must change the docserver script, cvwds.boot that use the same arguments as cvw.boot (start | stop). We only changed the local directories for the docserver and the database and commented the line that shuts down the mysql server (because we have our own databases running).

Also you must check that the .jar files inside the webapps/app directory must be there and not in subdirectories.

If you are lucky you are almost done.

The final step is to untar the client file. We did it under /opt/CVWclient/ . The script with all the needed data is called server.cvw, in my case the lines that we modified were the following:

# Property file for CVW
#
cvw.server.host=cvw
cvw.server.port=8888
cvw.server.name=cvw
cvw.docserver.host=cvw
cvw.docserver.port=8080
cvw.docserver.url=/app/docservlet
cvw.version=4.0
cvw.debug=true

#############
# User Images
#############
#this url must end with a /
cvw.userimages.url=http://localhost/cvw/user-images/

The cvw.docserver.url is key... we don't know why the original points to another direction and you discover after several trials that this is the MOST IMPORTANT line to get acces to your docserver.

At this moment you are ready to enter the first time to your CVW server. For your first login you will enter as "Admin" with no password.

Now you can change your password under "File" and use the Admin Tool under "View".

As the menu shows, there's a lot of tools available and that make this application a reference in virtual education.

cvw
cvw
cvw

This configuration is working now in our server. You can try this utility. If you wish want information: they have a good manual in pdf.

Enjoy.

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Translation information:

es --> -- : Juan Manuel Triana,Carlos Andrés Pérez <jutriana/at/uniweb.net.co, caperez/at/usaca.edu.co>

es --> en: Juan Manuel Triana <jutriana/at/uniweb.net.co>

2003-08-30, generated by lfparser version 2.38