Laptop VM configuration

Two laptops have been purchased through the UHL for use on home visits for GRAPHIC2. Their service tags are 4MMVLX1 and JLMVLX1.

Configuration: VMWare Player installed by UHL IM&T. Ubuntu 120.10 LTS. ProFTPd (which needs openbsd-inetd installing first). WinSCP and PuTTY installed onto the Windows OS to connect to VM for file installations, etc. Use PuTTY to create a key pair for SSH connection. After that, WinSCP can connect using SFTP instead of FTP. Install ntp and set /etc/ntp.conf to point to the UK pool, because system time will get out of sync while the server is turned off. If this set-up doesn't do the trick we might need additional cron jobs. But ntp should sort it.

For REDCap, install php-pear, php5-curl, phpmyadmin. Laptops must have open-vm-tools installed in order to be able to do a 'soft' suspend.

The Windows host systems need VIX API installing to give the vmrun utility.

Put the 'Virtual Machines' directory into "C:\Users\Public" and then create a shortcut to use vmrun.exe to start VMWare Player and launch the relevant VM. If that shortcut were in the 'All Users' startup directory it would start automatically. But putting shortcuts in the 'All Users' directory requires admin permission. DONE.

The server needs suspending before the laptop is shutdown. This is accomplished with a small batch file that calls vmrun.exe to suspend the server, but it must be run as a local admin. So the laptops have additional admin users for Nick, Sue, Jay and Sue C. For UHL, Caroline Hughes has authorised the use of local admin rights. If, in future, a solution can be found to run vmrun.exe without admin rights, this can be changed.

Laptops must be shut down using the script not the power button. Otherwise there is a risk of data loss because the guest system will have MySQL shut down without warning, and possibly data will be cached in memory and not yet written to disk.

For more information on the multi-machine setup of REDCap (asyncronous data collection) see REDCap Multi-server set up.