1 The Installation Guide for DXSpider under Microsoft Windows
2 Iain Philipps, G0RDI (g0rdi@77hz.com)
3 Version 1.1 28 March 2001
5 DX Spider under Microsoft Windows (TM)
6 ______________________________________________________________________
16 1.4 Additional packages
19 2. Installing the software
21 2.1 The AGW packet engine
22 2.2 Setting up the initial user files
24 2.4 Connecting to other clusters
27 ______________________________________________________________________
33 What you'll be left with once you've followed these instructions is
34 (hopefully) a working DX Spider v1.47 system that is capable of
35 accepting or originating "internet" connections, plus inbound AX.25
36 and TCP/IP radio connections. If the absence of outbound radio
37 connections is a serious limitation for you, it would be better for
38 you to wait a couple more weeks until this support has been added.
40 On the other hand, you may have an enquiring mind, or better yet, may
41 be looking for a useful way of connecting your current (perhaps) AK1A
42 cluster "to the internet" via some networking mechanism (BPQEther,
43 etc) or other. I won't be producing instructions for the latter case,
44 because I don't have an AK1A to play with. But someone might ...
46 Whatever, this document is intended to get you started with DX Spider
47 in a Microsoft Windows (TM) environment. It's not intended to teach
48 you anything other than how to perform a minimum configuration of a DX
49 Spider installation and have it able to connect across "the internet"
50 to other DX Clusters, while accepting inbound TELNET and radio
56 The very first things you're going to need are (in order of
60 o A cup of good, strong tea
62 o A supported Windows platform with an internet connection so you can
63 download the necessary software bits and bobs directly to it. There
64 are other ways, but this is preferable.
67 o Another cup of good, strong tea
69 o If all goes according to plan, about an hour to spare
71 o Plenty of good, strong tea
76 The platform I used to generate these instructions was a "vanilla"
77 Microsoft Windows Me 4.90.3000 system, with a 700MHz AMD Athlon
78 processor and 96 Mb memory. I've also personally verified that it runs
79 on my laptop (Pentium 266MHz, 32 Mb memory, Windows 98 SE v4.10.2222
80 A) and a computer that I assembled from a random pile of junk (AMD
81 K6-2 333MHz, 64 Mb memory, Windows 98 v4.10.1998). As a result, I have
82 reason to believe that what I'm about to describe will perform equally
83 on any 32-bit MS Windows environment with 32 Mb of memory.
85 Because of the changes that have recently been made to the core
86 "cluster.pl" module and the introduction of a very lightweight
87 "winclient.pl", I have a sneaking suspicion that this will now run on
88 any platform that has reasonably complete support for Perl. Is there
89 someone out there with both an enquiring mind and (say) a Macintosh,
92 Please bear in mind, though, that my instructions relate solely to how
93 to get this going under a Microsoft Windows environment, and I have
94 zero intention of trying to make them say otherwise.
99 Install your chosen Perl environment. Unless you have a very good
100 reason for not doing so, I strongly suggest that you use ActivePerl
101 v5.6. For my testing & development, I used build 623. You can get
103 http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/Download.html
105 You will need to choose either the MSI or the AS package. My
106 recommendation is that you choose the MSI package and deal with the
107 consequences if your system isn't equipped with support for the latest
108 MS Installer; you'll be better off in the long run. The build 623
109 download is 7,460 KB, so now is a really good time to have some tea if
110 you're on a slow dial-up connection.
112 During installation, please ensure that you do choose the options to
113 "Add Perl to the PATH environment variable" and "Create Perl file
114 extension association"; it will make your life so much easier. Once
115 the installation is finished, be sure to reboot your PC. You probably
116 won't be told anywhere else that this needs to be done now, but it
119 Once you've rebooted, open a "DOS box" (Start > Run > command might do
120 it, if you can't find it elsewhere) and from wherever it lands, type
121 PERL -v <ENTER> (it's better if that's a lower-case be rewarded with
122 some interesting information about your Perl installation. If you're
123 not, you must go back to the beginning and discover what went wrong
124 and fix it. It's pointless to proceed unless this simple check is
125 passed. Assuming it did work, you may now move on.
128 1.4. Additional packages
130 Some extensions ("packages") need to be added to the base Perl
131 distribution, and we'll do this next. If you're using the Perl I
132 recommended, and don't know any better for yourself, then just blindly
133 following these instructions will work just fine. If that didn't
134 describe you, then you're on your own.
136 Visit the following URL:
138 http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/zips/6xx-builds-only/
140 and download the following files:-
153 Make yourself a convenient directory to unpack all of these zip files
154 into (I put mine in "D:\ppm>") and do the following (the bits you type
155 in are blue ). Note that where these files land will be directly
156 related to where you chose to install your ActivePerl (mine, as you
157 can probably guess from what follows, went into "D:\Perl"):-
161 D:\ppm>ppm install Data-Dumper.ppd
162 Installing package 'Data-Dumper.ppd'
163 Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.bs
164 Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.dll
165 Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.exp
166 Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.lib
167 Installing D:\Perl\html\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.html
168 Installing D:\Perl\site\lib\Data\Dumper\Dumper.pm
169 Writing D:\Perl\site\lib\auto\Data\Dumper\Dumper.packlist
175 I'm not going to bother you with exhaustive details of the rest of
176 them, but suffice it to say you need to:
180 ppm install DB_File.ppd
181 ppm install Net-Telnet.ppd
182 ppm install TimeDate.ppd
183 ppm install Time-HiRes.ppd
188 If all that seemed to work OK, time to move along. Before anyone who
189 is familiar with PPM tells me that we didn't need to download and keep
190 those files locally, I knew that. I also knew that PPM is sometimes
191 awkward to configure via firewalls, and that sometimes the
192 repositories don't always work the way we'd hope. I do it that way
201 Get the current version of the DX Spider distribution. This needs to
202 be v1.47 or later. You've got two ways (currently) of getting this;
203 either get a CVS update from sourceforge (if you don't know what this
204 is, then it isn't for you) or get my package from:-
206 http://www.dcc.rsgb.org/WinSpider.zip
208 If you went down the CVS route, then everything will be nicely set out
209 on your local disk. If you got the ZIP file, unpack it to somewhere
210 convenient. The following examples assume that you put it on drive
211 "C:\", for convenience.
213 NOTE: This distribution method will go away as soon as the first v1.47
214 tarball is released. You can use WinZip to unpack that, and my life
215 will be made easier by not needing to keep this .ZIP file updated.
218 2. Installing the software
220 Ensure that your CVS session or your unZIPped file have left you with
221 a directory "C:\spider\local"; if not, go to "C:\spider\" and create
222 one. If "C:\spider" is missing, go back and figure out why, because it
225 Now create your own local copy of the DXVars.pm file by:-
229 copy c:\spider\perl\DXVars.pm.issue
230 c:\spider\local\DXVars.pm
235 Now you'll need to edit this file using a text editor. If nothing
254 to bring up an editor window containing the file. As an absolute
255 minimum you must adjust the following items in DXVars.pm:-
258 o $mycall - Should hold the callsign of your DX Cluster
260 o $myname - The SysOp's first name
262 o $myalias - the SysOp's callsign. Cannot be the same as $mycall!
265 You really also ought to update the $mylatitude, $mylongitude, $myqth
266 and $myemail variables. And unless you are absolutely certain you know
267 what you're doing, you should change nothing else in this file.
270 2.1. The AGW packet engine
272 On the assumption that you'll be using the SV2AGW Packet Engine to
273 interface your radios to the cluster, you should now create your own
274 local copy of AGWConnect.pm by:-
278 copy c:\spider\perl\AGWConnect.pm
279 c:\spider\local\AGWConnect.pm
288 notepad AGWConnect.pm
293 to bring up an editor window containing the file. You must consider
294 adjusting the following items in AGWConnect.pm:-
297 o $enable - set to '1' to enable AGWPE interface
299 o $login - the login ID you chose when you set up the SV2AGW
302 o $passwd - password that matches $login
305 2.2. Setting up the initial user files
307 Next you need to create the initial user files, etc. A tool is
308 supplied which will do this for you. To run the tool:-
318 If all goes according to plan, you will see no output from this
319 program, and after a brief wait, your DOS prompt will be returned.
321 Depending on how brave you are, you might now care to try the
331 If you did everything you were told, your DOS window will now hold a
332 display which looks something like:-
336 DXSpider DX Cluster Version 1.47
337 Copyright (c) 1998-2001 Dirk Koopman G1TLH
339 loading band data ...
340 loading user file system ...
341 starting listeners ...
342 Internal port: localhost 27754
344 reading in duplicate spot and WWV info ...
345 reading existing message headers ...
349 @msg = 0 before delete
350 @msg = 0 after delete
351 reading cron jobs ...v cron: reading /spider/cmd/crontab
352 cron: adding 1 0 * * 0
353 DXUser::export("$main::data/user_asc")
354 reading database descriptors ...
355 doing local initialisation ...
356 orft we jolly well go ...
362 Now, if that's what you've got, you are very nearly home and dry (in
363 as far as these particular experiments are concerned, anyhow)
365 To access your new cluster (from the local machine) find yourself
366 another "DOS box" and do the following:-
376 If you are rewarded with a display which looks something like:-
380 Hello Iain, this is GB7SJP in Amersham, Bucks running DXSpider V1.47
381 Cluster: 1 nodes, 1 local / 1 total users Max users 2 Uptime 0 00:00
382 M0ADI de GB7SJP 4-Mar-2001 1511Z >
387 You've arrived. Try some commands, and see how they feel. (In case you
388 were wondering, "Iain", "M0ADI" and "GB7SJP" all came from the version
389 of DXVars.pm that was on the machine when I started the winclient.pl)
392 2.3. Incoming telnets
394 If you want to enable inbound "TELNET" connections, you've got a
395 little more work to do. From a handy "DOS box" that's not doing
396 anything else, do the following:-
397 copy \spider\perl\listeners.pm \spider\local
404 The following lines need attention:-
409 ["foo.dxcluster.net", 7300],
414 On my machine, I've simply uncommented the "localhost" entry by
415 removing the '#' from the front of the line. I've also uncommented the
416 second line, and changed the hostname to point at "spud.ath.cx".
418 If you don't have a static hostname for your machine, and you intend
419 to allow folk to connect to your machine across the internet, then I'd
420 suggest you pay a visit to www.dyndns.org and create one for yourself.
421 While it's free, it will take a modest an amount of effort on your
422 part to read, understand and implement what needs to be done to set
426 2.4. Connecting to other clusters
428 If you want to connect this to another cluster, then you'll want to
429 negotiate a link with someone. For experimental purposes, I'm happy to
430 allow folk to connect to GB7DXA (spud.ath.cx), on the understanding
431 that the system may or may not be there and may or may not be
432 connected to anything particularly useful at any given moment. Contact
433 me by Email if you want me to set up a connection for you.
435 Last updated: 05-Mar-01