The Installation Guide for DXSpider under Microsoft Windows Iain Philipps, G0RDI (g0rdi@77hz.com) Version 1.1 28 March 2001 DX Spider under Microsoft Windows (TM) ______________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1.1 The requirements 1.2 The system 1.3 Perl 1.4 Additional packages 1.5 Getting Spider 2. Installing the software 2.1 The AGW packet engine 2.2 Setting up the initial user files 2.3 Incoming telnets 2.4 Connecting to other clusters ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Introduction IMPORTANT: What you'll be left with once you've followed these instructions is (hopefully) a working DX Spider v1.47 system that is capable of accepting or originating "internet" connections, plus inbound AX.25 and TCP/IP radio connections. If the absence of outbound radio connections is a serious limitation for you, it would be better for you to wait a couple more weeks until this support has been added. On the other hand, you may have an enquiring mind, or better yet, may be looking for a useful way of connecting your current (perhaps) AK1A cluster "to the internet" via some networking mechanism (BPQEther, etc) or other. I won't be producing instructions for the latter case, because I don't have an AK1A to play with. But someone might ... Whatever, this document is intended to get you started with DX Spider in a Microsoft Windows (TM) environment. It's not intended to teach you anything other than how to perform a minimum configuration of a DX Spider installation and have it able to connect across "the internet" to other DX Clusters, while accepting inbound TELNET and radio connections. 1.1. The requirements The very first things you're going to need are (in order of importance):- o A cup of good, strong tea o A supported Windows platform with an internet connection so you can download the necessary software bits and bobs directly to it. There are other ways, but this is preferable. o Another cup of good, strong tea o If all goes according to plan, about an hour to spare o Plenty of good, strong tea 1.2. The system The platform I used to generate these instructions was a "vanilla" Microsoft Windows Me 4.90.3000 system, with a 700MHz AMD Athlon processor and 96 Mb memory. I've also personally verified that it runs on my laptop (Pentium 266MHz, 32 Mb memory, Windows 98 SE v4.10.2222 A) and a computer that I assembled from a random pile of junk (AMD K6-2 333MHz, 64 Mb memory, Windows 98 v4.10.1998). As a result, I have reason to believe that what I'm about to describe will perform equally on any 32-bit MS Windows environment with 32 Mb of memory. Because of the changes that have recently been made to the core "cluster.pl" module and the introduction of a very lightweight "winclient.pl", I have a sneaking suspicion that this will now run on any platform that has reasonably complete support for Perl. Is there someone out there with both an enquiring mind and (say) a Macintosh, for instance? Please bear in mind, though, that my instructions relate solely to how to get this going under a Microsoft Windows environment, and I have zero intention of trying to make them say otherwise. 1.3. Perl Install your chosen Perl environment. Unless you have a very good reason for not doing so, I strongly suggest that you use ActivePerl v5.6. For my testing & development, I used build 623. You can get this from:- http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/Download.html You will need to choose either the MSI or the AS package. My recommendation is that you choose the MSI package and deal with the consequences if your system isn't equipped with support for the latest MS Installer; you'll be better off in the long run. The build 623 download is 7,460 KB, so now is a really good time to have some tea if you're on a slow dial-up connection. During installation, please ensure that you do choose the options to "Add Perl to the PATH environment variable" and "Create Perl file extension association"; it will make your life so much easier. Once the installation is finished, be sure to reboot your PC. You probably won't be told anywhere else that this needs to be done now, but it does. Really. Once you've rebooted, open a "DOS box" (Start > Run > command might do it, if you can't find it elsewhere) and from wherever it lands, type PERL -v (it's better if that's a lower-case be rewarded with some interesting information about your Perl installation. If you're not, you must go back to the beginning and discover what went wrong and fix it. It's pointless to proceed unless this simple check is passed. Assuming it did work, you may now move on. 1.4. Additional packages Some extensions ("packages") need to be added to the base Perl distribution, and we'll do this next. If you're using the Perl I recommended, and don't know any better for yourself, then just blindly following these instructions will work just fine. If that didn't describe you, then you're on your own. Visit the following URL: http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/6xx-builds-only/ and download the following files:- Data-Dumper.zip Net-Telnet.zip TimeDate.zip Time-HiRes.zip DB_File.zip Make yourself a convenient directory to unpack all of these zip files into (I put mine in "D:\ppm>") and do the following (the bits you type in are blue ). Note that where these files land will be directly related to where you chose to install your ActivePerl (mine, as you can probably guess from what follows, went into "D:\Perl"):- D:\ppm>ppm install Data-Dumper.ppd Installing package 'Data-Dumper.ppd' Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.bs Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.dll Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.exp Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.lib Installing D:\Perl\html\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.html Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\Data\Dumper\Dumper.pm Writing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.packlist D:\ppm> I'm not going to bother you with exhaustive details of the rest of them, but suffice it to say you need to: ppm install DB_File.ppd ppm install Net-Telnet.ppd ppm install TimeDate.ppd ppm install Time-HiRes.ppd If all that seemed to work OK, time to move along. Before anyone who is familiar with PPM tells me that we didn't need to download and keep those files locally, I knew that. I also knew that PPM is sometimes awkward to configure via firewalls, and that sometimes the repositories don't always work the way we'd hope. I do it that way because it suits me. 1.5. Getting Spider Get the current version of the DX Spider distribution. This needs to be v1.47 or later. You've got two ways (currently) of getting this; either get a CVS update from sourceforge (if you don't know what this is, then it isn't for you) or get my package from:- http://www.dcc.rsgb.org/WinSpider.zip If you went down the CVS route, then everything will be nicely set out on your local disk. If you got the ZIP file, unpack it to somewhere convenient. The following examples assume that you put it on drive "C:\", for convenience. NOTE: This distribution method will go away as soon as the first v1.47 tarball is released. You can use WinZip to unpack that, and my life will be made easier by not needing to keep this .ZIP file updated. 2. Installing the software Ensure that your CVS session or your unZIPped file have left you with a directory "C:\spider\local"; if not, go to "C:\spider\" and create one. If "C:\spider" is missing, go back and figure out why, because it shouldn't be. Now create your own local copy of the DXVars.pm file by:- copy c:\spider\perl\DXVars.pm.issue c:\spider\local\DXVars.pm Now you'll need to edit this file using a text editor. If nothing else, you can simply cd \spider\local and then notepad DXVars.pm to bring up an editor window containing the file. As an absolute minimum you must adjust the following items in DXVars.pm:- o $mycall - Should hold the callsign of your DX Cluster o $myname - The SysOp's first name o $myalias - the SysOp's callsign. Cannot be the same as $mycall! You really also ought to update the $mylatitude, $mylongitude, $myqth and $myemail variables. And unless you are absolutely certain you know what you're doing, you should change nothing else in this file. 2.1. The AGW packet engine On the assumption that you'll be using the SV2AGW Packet Engine to interface your radios to the cluster, you should now create your own local copy of AGWConnect.pm by:- copy c:\spider\perl\AGWConnect.pm c:\spider\local\AGWConnect.pm and then notepad AGWConnect.pm to bring up an editor window containing the file. You must consider adjusting the following items in AGWConnect.pm:- o $enable - set to '1' to enable AGWPE interface o $login - the login ID you chose when you set up the SV2AGW security :-) o $passwd - password that matches $login 2.2. Setting up the initial user files Next you need to create the initial user files, etc. A tool is supplied which will do this for you. To run the tool:- cd \spider\perl perl create_sysop.pl If all goes according to plan, you will see no output from this program, and after a brief wait, your DOS prompt will be returned. Depending on how brave you are, you might now care to try the following:- perl cluster.pl If you did everything you were told, your DOS window will now hold a display which looks something like:- DXSpider DX Cluster Version 1.47 Copyright (c) 1998-2001 Dirk Koopman G1TLH loading prefixes ... loading band data ... loading user file system ... starting listeners ... Internal port: localhost 27754 load badwords: Ok reading in duplicate spot and WWV info ... reading existing message headers ... load badmsg: Ok load forward: Ok load swop: Ok @msg = 0 before delete @msg = 0 after delete reading cron jobs ...v cron: reading /spider/cmd/crontab cron: adding 1 0 * * 0 DXUser::export("$main::data/user_asc") reading database descriptors ... doing local initialisation ... orft we jolly well go ... queue msg (0) Now, if that's what you've got, you are very nearly home and dry (in as far as these particular experiments are concerned, anyhow) To access your new cluster (from the local machine) find yourself another "DOS box" and do the following:- cd \spider\perl perl winclient.pl If you are rewarded with a display which looks something like:- Hello Iain, this is GB7SJP in Amersham, Bucks running DXSpider V1.47 Cluster: 1 nodes, 1 local / 1 total users Max users 2 Uptime 0 00:00 M0ADI de GB7SJP 4-Mar-2001 1511Z > You've arrived. Try some commands, and see how they feel. (In case you were wondering, "Iain", "M0ADI" and "GB7SJP" all came from the version of DXVars.pm that was on the machine when I started the winclient.pl) 2.3. Incoming telnets If you want to enable inbound "TELNET" connections, you've got a little more work to do. From a handy "DOS box" that's not doing anything else, do the following:- copy \spider\perl\listeners.pm \spider\local cd \spider\local notepad listeners.pm The following lines need attention:- ["localhost", 7300], ["foo.dxcluster.net", 7300], On my machine, I've simply uncommented the "localhost" entry by removing the '#' from the front of the line. I've also uncommented the second line, and changed the hostname to point at "spud.ath.cx". If you don't have a static hostname for your machine, and you intend to allow folk to connect to your machine across the internet, then I'd suggest you pay a visit to www.dyndns.org and create one for yourself. While it's free, it will take a modest an amount of effort on your part to read, understand and implement what needs to be done to set this up. 2.4. Connecting to other clusters If you want to connect this to another cluster, then you'll want to negotiate a link with someone. For experimental purposes, I'm happy to allow folk to connect to GB7DXA (spud.ath.cx), on the understanding that the system may or may not be there and may or may not be connected to anything particularly useful at any given moment. Contact me by Email if you want me to set up a connection for you. Last updated: 05-Mar-01