VMWare Appliance Now available online

Dan made a VMWare Appliance of the PHGrid Globus node and it's available at http://phgrid.net/documents/node/v1/.

If you download both of the files here, you can run a SUSE installation of the Globus Toolkit. This will make configuration easier as all you have to do is make a few configuration changes(set the IP, hostname, user accounts, request a user and host cert, etc).

This will reduce the install time down even lower (5 minutes) and allow PHGrid nodes to run on Windows (through the free VMWare player).

This first release is still pretty large (4.5GB download, 8GB necessary to run) so it may take you a while to download (took me over 30 minutes to upload).

Potential New Node & Preliminary Source Control

Dan and I had a productive call with Craig Haddix, the Data Coordinator with the Indiana Hemophilia & Thrombosis Center, about them connecting to the public health research grid. Craig was enthusiastic and Dan covered some of the requirements for starting the node install (linux server, specific ports to be opened, etc. etc.).

Dan's sending over the install guide to Craig so he can review it with his staff.

An interesting point is that since IHTC primarily uses Windows they may want to look at running a grid instance through a Linux image running in VMWare on top of a Windows machine.

Also, to save time I've applied for a sourceforge.net project for the software components that we will be developing shortly. This is a temporary measure until we can get a proper subversion, collaboration and issue tracking server in place that the public can hit. For now the license is Apache v2 (since that's what Globus is using). But as the CDC develops an official open source licensing policy, this project will migrate the source to licenses as appropriate.

I'll post the URL to the sourceforge project as soon as it is approved (assuming it is approved).