Installing grin-global on a Non-Windows Server

The following might be useful as a tech writing example. I took Pete’s email (below), and created a Word doc from it (below his message). With some iterative questioning, I put the doc together. This ultimately was included in a larger document. The intended audience are technical IT people – system administrators with heavy IT experience.

Hello Michael,

I'm sorry to be getting involved in this email thread so late, but I was on vacation last week (a nice relaxing week at the beach with no computers – I highly recommend it!) so this is my first chance to respond.  Here are the steps I would recommend you attempt to get your system up and running with MySQL on a remote (non-Windows) server. 

Step 1 – Install the GG system on a fresh clean Windows box as follows:

a) Cleanly install either XP Pro SP3 or Windows 7 Pro/Ultimate (not the Home Edition please).

b) Install MySQL – I typically use the Windows Essentials 5.1 installer (make sure the default storage engine is InnoDB). 

c) Navigate your browser to our beta-test downloads website: http://test.grin-global.org/gringlobal/downloads/ and download and install the Updater application by following the instruction in the attached PDF (the Updater install steps start on page 9 but the first 8 pages are good background material before you install). 

d) Follow the steps in the PDF document for installing all three of the GG server components on the Windows box (see page 17) – you will want to create the GG server using a localhost database connection – it should automatically detect your MySQL installation and install the GG database to it.

Note: You do not need to install the Curator Tool on the server to get your GG server up and running (the Curator Tool is an application designed to be used on the curators desktop computer – not something that is typically used directly on the GG server – but having said that, there is nothing that prevents you from installing the Curator Tool on the server if you prefer)

Step 2 – Load your local data (using the Import Wizard in the Administrator Tool) to the new MySQL GG database

a) Start the Administrator Tool.

b) Follow the instructions in the attached PDF for preparing your local data for importing to GG using the Import Wizard

NOTE: you can use the template data at our website (http://www.grin-global.org/index.php/Training) to see example data for how to properly format your import data.

The instructions are in the PDF link in the left column and the sample data are in the links in the right column.

Step 3 – Load the data into your remote MySQL database server

a) Backup the MySQL GG database from your localhost Windows server

b) Copy the backup file over to your remote MySQL database and restore it there

Step 4 – Modify the database connection used by the middle tier web services to point at your new remote MySQL database (see image)

a) Start the Administrator Tool

b) Expand the ‘Web Application’ branch

c) Select ‘DataManager (Connection String)’ branch (it is the bottom branch in the tree)

d) Modify the ‘Data Source=localhost’ portion of the connection string to point at your remote server

e) Reboot the GG Windows server and try connecting to the localhost GG website (http://localhost/gringlobal/search.aspx) from the Windows box

If all went well, your GG website, web services and search engine should all be using the data stored in the remote MySQL database.

On a slightly different subject... 

To answer your questions about how the Curator Tool interacts with changing the MySQL database server as you did in the step above...  The short and simple answer is that it has no effect on the Curator Tool at all.  The reason is because the CT only gets data through the web services (Middle Tier) so when you changed the Middle Tier database connection string in Step 3d above the Curator Tool knew nothing about it but it will now be getting data from the new database server (instead of getting data from your original MySQL GG database on the Windows box).

If that last paragraph has confused you, perhaps these ‘fun facts’ about the GG system will help clarify things:

1) There are three tiers in the GG system – Client Tier, Middle Tier, and Data Tier.

2) The Curator Tool (a Client Tier application) never talks to the Data Tier directly (in your case the Data Tier is the remote MySQL database).

3) The Middle Tier consists of three sub-components: the GG website, the Search Engine, and the Web Services (data brokers used by the Client Tier applications).

4) The Middle Tier runs under the IIS web server on a Windows box.

5) The Curator Tool only talks to the Middle Tier Web Services, and it does so using HTML and XML through port 80 on the IIS server (very firewall friendly). 

6) The Middle Tier acts as the ‘middle man’ for brokering the data between the Data Tier and the Curator Tool.  Therefore the Curator Tool never needs a database connector to the GG database because it never connects directly to that database – instead it requests data from the Middle Tier which then uses its MySQL database connector to get the data from the remote MySQL database.

I hope this helps to clarify some of the confusion.  Please do not hesitate to let us know how we can be of further assistance during your installation of GG on MySQL.

Thanks,