It was a snow day of sorts on January 29th 2014..
First off – I could start a whole tirade (and probably should) on the state of the GIS Profession. There is a lot of technology in play and unfortunately we don’t play enough with it. How many of you have worked with github? Vagrant? If I said Geojson would you go “what?” or point out it’s GeoJSON? Leaflet? Granted – I don’t do enough with technology because – well – we have to make money so it’s always a bit of a push to stay abreast of the tech…but if a client calls we need to be able to at least speak with some authority depending on the question.
I love open source software. I love GIS. I got a comment from Ivan Mincik on his GIS.Lab project after the opengeo blog post. I’ve installed enough software to know it can be painful. I once did a “sneaker net” install on something like 30 computers only to walk in the next day and find all 30 had been erased. So how would you roll out a GIS Lab quickly? I’m guessing that if you had the desire this could done in a windows environment – but linux is quite a bit more flexible (and free) and this works incredibly well.
So from the readme and all the docs at Ivan’s Github Page:
Key features:
- super easy fully automatic deployment and maintenance – all operation are encapsulated in easy to use commands
- nearly zero requirements for client machines – no operating system or software needed, no hard disk needed
- no limit of number of client machines
- 100 percent real computer user experience – no thin client glitches
- central management of all client OS images, user accounts and user data
- every user can log in from any client machine to get his working environment
- unbreakable client OS images – after every client reload you always get fresh OS environment
- rich software equipment of client machines for internet browsing, email, chat, images and video, word, spreadsheet and presentation editing and more
- out of box internet sharing from host machine to all client machines
- out of box working file sharing service (NFS)
- out of box database server (PostgreSQL/PostGIS)
- Linux system security
- great platform for studying open source technologies beginning from Linux OS, various system services and end user software
- out of box working web GIS publishing solution
So you get Postgresql/PostGIS, QGIS, and QGIS Server. It’s pretty easy to get running. I won’t cover it in detail but you need to get vagrant installed and download Ivan’s Code from github. Grab a vagrant box (canonical’s 12.04 LTS release) and essentially 1 command later – “Vagrant up” and you are on your way. Vagrant takes some of the pain in deploying a testing environment. Thought a series of scripts and configuration files you can “build” a repeatable setup in just a few minutes.
I used virtualbox to simulate a diskless client (computer with no hard drive). I now have this running with a QGIS project and web map. The client runs off 1gb of RAM.
You have a low cost lab with a very easy setup. If you have at least one decent computer to install vagrant on you can set up a bunch of thin clients (i.e. computers with no disk drives, laptops, etc) to display the lab. Great for education, emergencies, or training.Share data with QGIS server amongst the lab participants.
So for all of you out there how useful is this setup? I know probably not for production mapping work. Actually – it’s quite possible to do production mapping work on this. For education? For an emergency? For a day of teaching people how/what to map as opposed to worrying about licensing/installation issues. I think pretty good. Ivan said this is still under heavy development. I think I installed the pre .3 GIS.lab to get this running and only had a couple of hiccups.
Go forth – Learn!
