[Koha] Live DVD (Was: Master-password (katikoan) and Live-DVD)

[King, Fred]

Greetings, all,

We're on a fairly tight deadline to switch from Horizon to Koha, and my knowledge of Linux is growing but not sufficient to manage a full install from packages, so I'm using Vimar Kumal's Live-DVD to set up our system. So far, I've set up two test systems that are working smoothly, and I'll start working on the production system later this week. I've been able to install Xubuntu updates and upgrade to Koha 3.10.5 without many problems. For a small library collection (5000 bibs, 20000+ items), it's been great. (Note: Vimar's message that he's creating a 3.12 DVD came through as I was typing this. Oh well. I think we'll stick with 3.10.5 for a while.)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a message about a couple of problems I was having with the OPAC. Then I got distracted by some other work and only got back to the problems recently. Here are my solutions:

On the individual item display, the "Item type" field was blank. On my setup, this field is controlled by CCODE in Authorized Values. I added our item types to CCODE, but they still didn't show up. Then I broke our collection into barcodes by item type and did a bulk item modification for each type. Worked like a charm.

The second and more frustrating problem was that on the search results screen with multiple items, each item showed nothing available, even though they definitely were. Checking the item out and back in again didn't work.I checked the list archives and found that the way to fix this was to run fix_onloan.pl in the migration tools directory, but I wasn't having any success getting it to run. A friend helped me figure out the process: from any terminal window, type the following:
   export KOHA_CONF=/etc/koha/sites/library/koha-conf.xml
   sudo chmod a=rw koha-conf.xml
   perl -I/usr/share/koha/lib -I/usr/share/koha/lib/C4 /usr/share/koha/bin/migration_tools/fix_onloan.pl

That made it possible to fix the problem by checking items out and back in, but checking out each item one-by-one is a bit cumbersome even for a small library like ours. Eventually I hit on the idea of putting a batch of barcodes in .koc format, creating a special staff account (998) to check them out to, and uploading the .koc file. The file's contents looks something like this:
Version=1.0	Generator=kocQt4	GeneratorVersion=1.0
2013-05-20 13:29:45 265	issue	998	32975000117403
2013-05-20 13:29:45 265	issue	998	32975000115803
2013-05-20 13:29:45 265	issue	998	32975000108063
2013-05-20 13:29:45 265	issue	998	32975000012059
but a lot longer. Then I called up user 998 in the checkin screen, clicked on "return all" and the problem was solved.

Yes, they're both clumsy and inelegant solutions, but they work. Any suggestions for a better way to do either are welcome.

Fred King
Medical Librarian, MedStar Washington Hospital Center
fred.king at medstar.net
202-877-6221

-----Original Message-----
From: koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Mark Tompsett
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 7:51 AM
To: Lars J. Helbo
Cc: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: Re: [Koha] Master-password (katikoan) and Live-DVD

Greetings,

The Live-DVD is great for testing and demonstrating. A package installation 
is better for production use. When you install packages, the password is 
auto-magically created as part of the install process. Assuming your 
instance name is library, the command typically used to figure out what the 
password is before going into the web installation step is:
    $ sudo xmlstarlet sel -t -v 'yazgfs/config/pass' 
/etc/koha/sites/library/koha-conf.xml
Just change 'library' to whatever you call your instance.

Step-by-step guides are nice, but with the tendency for people to 
proliferate them all over the internet, this tends to lead towards a lot of 
outdated guides all over the place. And this leads to people following 
outdated instructions while trying to install current versions. This is 
generally a bad thing. If these are Live-DVD instructions, I would recommend 
you teaming with the person making the Live-DVD so that the instructions are 
together with the product for which they are intended. This will limit 
proliferation of older instructions.

As for your idea to limit the system user to only localhost is possible, but 
you would also have to consider various networking configurations such as 
proxies. Because of this complication, I don't foresee anyone spending time 
on it, but you are always welcome to supply a patch to Koha.

And lastly, I in no way reflect the final word on anything. :)

GPML,
Mark Tompsett 

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