Install Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition, with IIS.
we used 9.2.0.4 with all patches present on the Prod servers.
This requires several passes though the Oracle Universal Installer. First a “runtime” install, then run through again to install “Windows Support Components”, which includes the ODBC drivers that are needed for AppXtender.
Then we need to do two more passes though OUI to install patches, then drop in a few patched DLLs, and finally copy the TNSNames.ORA file from the oracle home on Prod servers to the NETWORK\Admin folder in the Oracle Home on this server.
Update for 2009 – We are now using the 10.2.0.4 database client, but installation is still pretty much the same… you still need the annoying Oracle Universal Installer, you still have to run OUI two to three times. Additionally, our DBA team has switched from use of the “TNSNames.ORA” file, to “SQLNet.ORA” and “LDAP.ORA”. Data Source names are now retrieved from an LDAP lookup. So, ditch the TNSNames file, drop in the new ones. Also, you must now request a firewall exemption to the database server to make this connection. Plan a day ahead of time to get access.
Create XS_Global service account, or use existing one.
Add the additional rights “Act as part of the operating system”, “log on as a service”, and “replace a process level token” rights using the Local Security Policy MMC tool.
Install DiskXtender 2000. Use existing licensing server if available. You will need to create service accounts for DX.
Start DX Administrator… you must be a Domain Admin or the local Administrator account. Members of local Admins have no rights to the DX console!
Under “Service” select “properties”, then “Settings”, and “Partition Map”.
Click “New”, then defined mappings for “DXTEST” (or whatever name you want to give to your DX Instance). There will ony be one option to choose from under the “Extended Drive” drop-down.
Add another mapping to “OBJECTS”, which will be the subdirectory created by AX in the DX repository.
Then Modify “TcpIpEndpoint” from 1050 to 6252. This will force DX to use a port that can be accessed from the campus LAN.
Install all AX Binaries… Includes AX Administration tools, ApplicationXtender Administrative installation, WebXtender, Rendering Server, ApplicatonXtender Web Services (IIS Mode).
Open the “System” control panel item. Go to “advanced”, and under “performance”, click “settings”. Go to the “Data Execution Prevention” tab, and add an exception for %ProgramFiles%\XtenderSolutions\Content Management\Render Server\WxRender.exe. This prevents the renderer from crashing in a Server 2003 SP1 environment.
Create shares for “rendering” and “wxsession”. Both shared need to be accessed Read/Write by the XS Service account. These allow the rendering service and webXtender service, respectively, to cache files that may need to be accessible to other servers in the AX infrastructure.
Use the “data source selector” tool in the ApplicationXtender Program Group. Define sources for IMGX and IMGY (test and pre-prod data sources). You will need to specify the “server name” as “IMGX.world”, and “IMGY.world”, as this is how they are defined in the TNSNames file. Note that you MUST use the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle, not the raw Oracle ODBC driver!
Start XtenderSolutions Administrator (XSAdmin forthwith).
On a new install, you would need to define “Windows Security” as the Security Model in the initial “Environment->Data Sources” window.
Server Name=DXTEST, Connection Type=RPC, DX Network Address=DOCIMGTEST, Network Transport=TCP/IP. Also, on the Prod server, we have defined the “end point” port as 6252.
Under “Storage->Paths”, make sure that any defined paths are valid. It is here that we define the connection to the “rendering” and “wxsession” shares that were created earlier.
Under “WebXtender->Setup”, you must define the service account, and under “Email” you need to specify “smtp.uvm.edu” as the email server, then define a “from” address for the service.
Under “Services->Rendering Server”, you again need to define a service account, then provide the “rendering” share created above as the Cache “location”.
Under “Services->XS Web Services”, define a service account.
Run “User Profile Administrator” in the XtenderSolutions Program Group. We set our users to NOT use the Interactive Client by default. However, using AppGen we have given all users the ability to change this setting.
Run the “Component Setup Wizard” in the XtenderSolutions Program Group. Run through the wizard for each component in the infrastructure (XS Web, WebXtender, Rendering Server).
In IIS Admin, get properties on the default web site, access the “Directory Security” tab, and install a server certificate.
Get properties on the /AppXtender subdirectory. In the “Documents” tab, add “Default.aspx” as a default content page. Failure to do so will result in an “403.14” error page.
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on December 11, 2006 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
It seems that some of our constituients have not been paying overly much attention to the settings on their scanners. We have over 40Gb of black-and-white, text-only documents scanned at 24 BPP, uncompressed, consuming 10 Mb each!
This happened once before. My colleague Warren licensed a product called “2TIFF” to shrink the files in question. This works well, except in his case ALL of the images in an Application folder needed to be compressed. I only need to shrink SOME of them.
After much fooling around and wasting of time, I was able to use a win32 port of the UNIX “find” command to hunt down all of the large files, dump the list to a file, and then use this file as a source for 2TIFF. The big mess of images now occupies only about 30 Mb of space.
-quantize=8 -> sets the “quantization” level of the TIFF. This value effects the “sampling rate” and affects image quality. Eight is the maximum value, for best quality.
-ct4 -> Compression type “LZW” is used. This is the default type for color scans. We are using LZW rather than the standard “type 3” for B/W documents because tests showed that reducing these images to monochrome yielded very low quality in some cases. We are keeping some color information to allow anti-aliasing and thus better letter quality.
-cd4 -> Sets the color depth down to 4 BPP from the source 24 BPP. CD1 would be better, but as mentioned above, this results in poor readability of the destination TIFF.
-keepexif -> preserves EXIF tags in the destination file from the source. Probably there is no EXIF info in these files, but I thought we would keep it in case I am wrong.
Warren had used the “dither” switch, but IMNSHO this makes the target document look worse and also results in larger files.
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on February 28, 2006 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
WebXtender has two modes: Interactive (IRC), or “Thin Client”. Interactive requires IE 6 with ActiveX controls, wheras “Thin” does not, but has fewer features.
To set the mode for users, you must enter the “User Profile Administrator” program that installs with XS Admin. You can change the global default, and/or the default for specific users (but not for Groups???!!!). Without further configuration, this option becomes fixed, and the user cannot change it.
However, in App Gen (part of a Full ApplicationXtender install), you can set a global option per-user or per-group called “Configure WS”. Once set, this allows the user to change ALL WebXtender user-configurable options, including the client mode.
Note: Setting this option in AppGen does not enable it for the user automatically! You must restart the WX service in order for the change to take effect! AARGH! (Recommended approach is to run the “Component Setup Wizard” which ships with XS Admin).
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on July 25, 2005 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
To simplify installation of the OC, I wrapped the files into a MSI using “Advanced Installer” v2.6.4 from Caphyon Software.
To accomplish this, I just needed to follow the previously documented manual installation routine, and take note of what changed on the system (specifically, I had a look at the REG text files generated by the ODBC installation script).
Advanced Installer lets to specify source files from ANY location, to be installed to a specified Program Files target. You also can specify Environment variables and Registry settings that you want performed during the install.
I just shipped the Install Directory to “University of Vermont\Oracle 10g Client”, and added an “admin” subdirectory for the TNSNAMES.ORA file. Then I set the PATH, SQLPath, and TNS_Admin environment variables. Finally, I specified the required ODBC registry changes, and built the MSI.
Since doing the build, a new version of OC 10g Instant Client has become available (v10.1.0.4). I have updated the installer to use these files instead. Making this change is fairly simple. All you have to do is open the original Adv Installer package specification file (.AIP), take note of the location of the source files, then drop the updated files into that location. If there are any new files, or files that are no longer present, you need to update the AIP to reflect these changes. Change the package version number, then rebuild… easy.
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on July 18, 2005 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
At the command line, go to the AX 5.20 installation directory.
"msiexec /p /a [working directory]\AxSetup.msi"
Now just zip the working directory into a single file.
The install directory can be added to a self-extracting zip, which calls the SETUP.EXE.
where [install_level] is a number from 1 to 3. 1=Retrieval install, 2=Scan, and 3=admin install.
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on May 16, 2005 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
-Create a TNSNAMES.ORA file in this location, past required entries into it (copied from the %ORACLE_HOME%\network\admin directory on the server “DOCIMG1”).
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on May 13, 2005 by J. Greg MacKinnon.
I uploaded the installer .zip to d:\install, then extracted. There are documentation PDF files in this folder. Following the instructions there, I have created a service account for the “Data Manager” (or primary DiskXtender) service. The account is CAMPUS\sa_dx-DataMngr. The account has been added to the local administrators group, as per the documentation.
Outside of that, all I have done is run the main DX setup.exe. The oply two options that I set were 1) the name of the service account to be used for the service and 2) the name/location of the Legato Licensing server. (The installer notes that the license sever on DOCIMG1 does NOT have a license for DX at this time, as noted above).
Note that I did NOT install the MediaStor application. This component does not appear to be required in our case as we will not be managing removable storage devices with our installation of DX.
After the install, I started up the DiskXtender Administrator program. I then ran the Service->New Extended drive wizard, and added the “I:” drive (mounted iSCSI LUN on “blocks.uvm.edu”). It is requested that you configure a number of options for the “Extended drive” at this time. I accepted the defaults for most options, other than “drive scan”, which I changed from “disabled” to instead run once a week on Saturday at 2:00 am.
The wizard also requests that you setup a “media folder” for the extended volume. I quickly added “hr_images”… I will wade through the documentation to see if I really need separate media folders for the whole volume. I would rather avoid touching this interface in the future… certainly I do not want to make setting up new media folders a prerequisite for new AX applications, if at all possible.
This entry was posted in Document Imaging on May 12, 2005 by J. Greg MacKinnon.