FlyingAnt Server - Using a FlyingAnt CD

CD's created using FlyingAnt server are designed to be as user-friendly as possible.

Starting FlyingAnt

Where possible, namely on Windows and some Linux systems, the CD will autorun and launch both FlyingAnt server and send the user to the appropriate start page in their web browser. When it is not possible to autorun, such as under Mac OSX where it is not supported or when they have autorun disabled on other platforms, the user will only be required to run a single start-up executable clearly labeled in the root of the CD (eg. "Start Windows.exe", "Start Linux.sh" or "Start Mac OSX"). These scripts will launch both the server and the users web browser with the CD homepage already loaded.

Known Problems Starting FlyingAnt on Linux

One known problem is that if when launching "Start Linux.sh" from the shell the user chooses "Run in terminal" the application will appear to start but then abruptly exit. The user should be instructed to simply choose "Run".

Another problem is that some Linux distributions are set up by default to not allow execution of binaries and scripts on removable media. This is a security measure to stop normal users from executing malicious code via a CD. When this is the case the startup script will simply not do anything when run from the shell. If trying to run the script from the command line a "Permission denied" error will appear. There are two ways to work around this.

The first method is to copy the entire contents of the CD/DVD to hard disk, and then set executable permissions on the files "autorun.sh", "Start Linux.sh", "Server/Linux/FlyingAntLinux" and "Website/Zoom/search_linux.cgi". Then you should be able to run "Start Linux.sh" as per normal.

The other method is to manually unmount the drive and remount it with execute permissions. The commands to do this would look something (but not necessarily exactly) like this,

umount /media/cdrom/
mount /dev/hdc /media/cdrom/ -t udf,iso9660 -o exec

Note that both these methods will require root privileges. If you are a sysadmin and would like CD's to auto mount with execute permissions for all users please look into modifying the "/etc/fstab" file to include the "exec" option.

Stopping FlyingAnt

Under Windows systems FlyingAnt will automatically close itself down when it detects that the CD has been ejected. On OSX and Linux systems it will be necessary for the user to shut down the server themselves before the CD may be ejected. However this has been made as easy as possible through providing clearly labeled Server shutdown executables in the root of the CD. It is also possible to provide server shutdown links from within the website itself by making links to a non-existent file called ".exit" in the root of the server (ie. "http://localhost:8091/.exit" ). Any request sent to this location will cause the server to shutdown.

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