We’ve been thinking recently about how to make it easier for people to try out the LORLS code. This includes ourselves – we sometimes want to spin up a new instance of LORLS for testing some feature or helping another site debug their installation. Normally that would mean doing an operating system, Perl module and then LORLS installation on a new machine (physical or virtual) before it could be used.

With the spread of virtual machine (VM) infrastructure, and the fact that many Universities now use VMs widely, we thought it might be worth making a “LORLS in a box” VM appliance image that people could grab and then use for testing, demos or as the basis of their own installation. The VM image would have LORLS pre-installed along with all the basic Perl modules required in place, and the test data that we use in our local sandbox instance.

To that end, here’s a first cut of a LORLS in a box VM image. This is an OVA virtual machine image (both the VM and the disc image).  Be warned that its quite large (over 900MB!) as it has a full operating system disc image included – you might want to have a cup of tea and biscuit handy whilst it downloads. The image was built using the Virtual Box OSE VM platform and is based on a CentOS 6 Linux base, and it should be able to be imported into other VM infrastructures such as VMware.

Once you’ve imported the LORLs-in-a-box VM into your VM infrastructure and started it up, you’ll eventually be presented with a login on the console.  Your VM system may complain about not having a matching ethernet controller the first time you run the VM image – you can ignore this error as the LORLS VM image should work round it when it boots up.  Once booted, the console should also show you the IP address that the VM has picked up and the URL that you can use to get to the CLUMP web front end.  By default the networking in the VM is using a bridged interface that picks up an IPv4 address via DHCP.  This is fine for testing and development, though if you’re using this image as the basis of a production system you’ll probably want to nip in and change this to a static IP address.

To login to the system there’s a “lorls” user with the password “lorls4you” (both without the quotes).  This user can then act as the superuser by using sudo.  The MySQL server on the machine has a root user password of “LUMPyStuff!” (again quoteless) should you wish to go in and tinker with the database directly.  You probably want to change all these passwords (and Linux root password) as soon as you can as everyone now knows them!  You’ll also most probably want to edit /usr/local/LUMP/LUMP.pm file to point at your own site’s Z39.50 server, etc.  There are a couple of demo LORLS web users hard coded into this demo system – user aker (password “demic”) is an academic that owns a reading list, and user “libby” (password “rarian”) is a library staff user.