Developer Access to caBigBox
These instructions assume you are a member of the @lab.
You can access the developer VM from your desktop using the vmware-console-server client.
You can install this client by browsing to:
https://vmserver2.lab.ac.uab.edu:8333
You will see a login dialog and, below it, an option to download the client application for Windows (or linux).
After you install the client application, you can log in to this web page using your BlazerId?/password and see an administrative overview the available virtual machines on this server and their current state (on or off). The cagrid instance, named caBigBox, is listed toward the end.
You can connect to this VM's desktop by clicking on the machine icon on to the left side of your entry, ie. "caBigBox". This should launch the vmware-server-console application and prompt you to connect to the client. The hostname and user name should be pre-populated and you should just need to supply your blazerid password. (If the dialog isn't filled in the host name is "vmserver2.lab.ac.uab.edu:902" and use blazerid/pass for the same).
If the machine is not already running, you can start it through the console or web interface. Otherwise, you can just log in using the default cagrid/cagrid account.
This VM is slightly modified from the caGrid developer node (v0.2). The changes are primarily related to improving the security so it can be put on a public network (turning off un-needed services, turning on the firewall, and turning on auto-update). Notes on this config are here.
The VMware Tools application is installed. It can improve the UI experience by providing smooth mouse cursor transition and copy/paste between the VM desktop and local desktop. You need to start this after the desktop login by running vmware-toolbox (the gear-icon on the bottom menu-bar). This app seems to be a little flakey, so you may want to run it only when you need to do cut and pastes to the VM. Please update ticket:71 with your experience.
The default user name and password remain uncanged, as does the default configuration to allow automatic access to root from this account. As such, SSH access to this VM is currently disabled. This is probably not that significant right now, since the caBIG tools assume local desktop access by default, but will likely be enabled later to support non-vmware-server-console interaction.
The single default cagrid account should be OK for now. Obviously we can all access this machine using this same cagrid account. This should help us help each other and force some collaboration on the configuration of tools on us. :) As we explore additional caBIG tools, we can add additional personal accounts. This may be an efficient approach since so many of the caBIG tools use some combinatation of Java, Tomcat/JBoss, and MySQL. These core utilities could be shared by multiple accounts. We can also add additional instances of the VM if we need to support distinct users or distinct configurations in the future. Feel free to add your own accounts, of course, if it is useful to explore specific caBIG applications. Just document it below or on uabgrid-dev.
