frustrated by RS and or bitnami

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Graeme Elliott

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Dec 9, 2019, 3:32:04 PM12/9/19
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downloaded bitnami 9.1 RS and installed in a ubuntu local machine (beside their lampp), and tried again as a standalone stack with a windows 10 local machine.

in both cases, there are no previews for pdf pages and no text extracted.  I have reviewed config.php and the path to imagemagick and ghostscript are set for both OSes.  I get a thumbnail and preview for jpeg, but not pdfs.

Too bad, because I was hoping to use a local version of RS as a complement for the file system, specifically to show page previews for hundreds of pdfs, rather than having to open them in Adobe Reader.  Idea is to be able to browse downloaded statements and bill, etc, easily.  I do have a bitnami RS running properly in an AWS machine, but trying to get my 70 year old++ brother to set up a machine in AWS is a stretch.

cannot find a log that will tell me what when wrong.  Log for a pdf asset show it tried to make page previews.

Not sure whose fault it is, (RS or bitnami) but it discourages use of RS.

09 December 19 @ 10:01 some olduser Edited resource field Date - 2019-12-09 19:20:47
+ 2019-12-09 19:20
 Revert
09 December 19 @ 09:21 some olduser Uploaded file
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Create previews:
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Starting preview preprocessing. File extension is pdf.
PDF multi page preview generation starting
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Create previews
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Edited resource field Original filename + 102mm_WideView_52270.pdf
 Revert
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Edited resource field Title + Microsoft Word - 102 WV spotting scope.doc
 Revert
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Extract
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Edited resource field Credit + AdobePS5.dll Version 5.1.1
 Revert
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Upload file
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Transformed file Exiftool tag
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Edited resource field Date + 2019-12-09 19:20:47
 Revert
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Created resource
09 December 19 @ 09:20 some olduser Change status Status -> Active



RS has decided my timezone is los angeles, not toronto,as set on the GUI,  and installation check show php TZ is not the same as mySql TZ, despite bitname having installed and configured both.

I had hoped that pdftotext would work, installed it for windows, but also no joy.
$pdftotext_path='C:/rs_bin/bin32';  << i tried backslash, forward slash, bin32 and bin64.  

I also set this in config.php 
$file_checksums = true; 
but don't see checksums in table resources.  I had hoped that checksums would allow me to easily find duplicated resources (not prevent upload of dupes but find them after the fact, like we did in Telescope at North Plains)

All in all, a lot of work on my part for nothing.



Mike Smith

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Dec 10, 2019, 9:56:49 AM12/10/19
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Graeme - 

After reading your posts for the past couple of days, it really sounds like you want RS to work like TS.web; It doesn't and that is a good thing. It does do the things that you have been asking / complaining about just not in a way you are used to, but all the directions are there if you look deeper. Just do a proper install on linux and RTFM, I mean this does not require registry edits, isn't a brain dump of Sauder slop like TS was. After spending years at NPS and then playing with ResourceSpace I can say without a doubt RS is a much better application, it just not written to run on an outdated, unsupported platform like TS was at NPS. 

You catch more flies with honey than you do salt. 

Dan Huby

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Dec 10, 2019, 9:58:33 AM12/10/19
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Hi Graeme, 

Sorry to hear you've had some difficulty configuring some of the features.

Windows can be a bit of a pain due to configuring appropriate permissions so the web user can execute the utilities. 

There are some options for help here: https://www.resourcespace.com/help

Best regards,

Dan

Graeme Elliott

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Dec 10, 2019, 10:52:32 AM12/10/19
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I thought bitnami was a proper install.
I thought setting paths to IM and GS would be all the config needed.  I assumed generating pdf page previews was out of the box behaviour. All I get is a default adobe icon placeholder thumbnail.
I thought setting checksums true would be all the config needed  (according to the manual). I assumed that would be part of the implementation of finding duplicated resources.
I really like RS, it works fine in my AWS account, using a bitnami full stack install.  I cannot figure out, even after RTFMing  what is wrong on my local install.  But, my hoped for usage was an easy install/config appliance to be an adjunct to my file system.  The cloud is nice, but overkill for what I want.
Much as I would like to slag NPS and TS, I am (very) happily retired from there, and will not indulge that impulse in public. :)

Not giving up. Not yet.  I am going to wipe the bitnami stack on my ubuntu local machine, and start over from scratch.
Should I just post all my concerns to bitnami?
g  

Dan Huby

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Dec 10, 2019, 11:25:31 AM12/10/19
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At Montala we use Ubuntu - although other platforms are supported, that one gets the most attention from us. Everything needed is available as a package so it's such an easy installation.

Bitnami take care of their own installation packages and we don't use them ourselves.


Hope that's useful.

Dan
Message has been deleted

Graeme Elliott

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Dec 10, 2019, 5:17:12 PM12/10/19
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the problem may be due to pdftotext.  Note it took 12 minutes to extract text in this log, if  am reading it correctly.  There is not a lot of text in this document. File processes in about a minute if I turn off pdftotest and only have exiftool and GS doing page previews. 

10 December 19 @ 12:01 User Name Edited resource field Date - 2019-12-10 21:48:42
+ 2019-12-10 21:48
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Uploaded file
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Transformed file Create previews
Generating preview size scr
Generating preview size pre
Generating preview size thm
Generating preview size col
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Transformed file Starting preview preprocessing. File extension is pdf.
PDF multi page preview generation starting
Page 1 generated successfully
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Edited resource field Original filename + genesequencing.pdf
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Transformed file Create previews
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Transformed file Create previews:
10 December 19 @ 12:00 User Name Edited resource field Extracted text + Review: The Role of Gene-Sequencing Projects
in the Study of Human Disease.

Name: Andrew Elliott
Student #: 992301022
Lab Day/Time: Thurs. 9-12
Lab Section: P0501C
TA’s Name: Joel

Introduction:
Gene sequencing is the processes of identifying MORE >
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Transformed file Extract
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Edited resource field Title + Introduction:
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Edited resource field Credit + Andrew
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Edited resource field Date + 2019-12-10 21:48:42
 Revert
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Transformed file Upload file
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Transformed file Exiftool tag
10 December 19 @ 11:48 User Name Created resource

Roger Howard

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Dec 10, 2019, 6:37:46 PM12/10/19
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> On Dec 10, 2019, at 5:17 PM, Graeme Elliott <gelliot...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> the problem may be due to pdftotext. Note it took 12 minutes to extract text in this log, if am reading it correctly.

That’s *really* long. Is the VM this is running on starved for memory?

Peter Klausener

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Dec 11, 2019, 3:28:54 AM12/11/19
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Hello,

I can confirm the problems to install RS on a Windows machine. It is not possible in my point of view. I tried a lot of things to get it running on WAMPP, Bitnami, Docker. The problem was always the handling of the necessary plugins, that in case of using RS in Windows will be installed on Windows and I was not able to connect the plugins in a working way (path problems, version problems against Windows and access rights). Bitnami for instance, does not deliver their package with the plugins installed and for me is was not posible to install them afterwards.

One other problem - which is mentioned here, too - is the preconfigured timezone (MySQL) in RS. It is very complicated to dig into this problem and difficult to solve.

I succeedet to get RS to work only, when I installed it finally on a Linux Server (in my case Debian and ngnix), even tere I had to solve the timezone-problem, which in my opinion is a RS problem. I posted my working solution here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/resourcespace/CtH0sw1lYdI

Dan Huby

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Dec 11, 2019, 4:13:00 AM12/11/19
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Although we only use Ubuntu for our hosted systems, we support many on-premise customers running on Windows - it's absolutely possible and once up and running it works as well as a Linux install. We don't use Bitnami, WAMPP, Docker, etc. - we do a native install and use IIS directly.

MySQL timezone setting is a separate non-RS issue you should look at MySQL sites/forums to resolve.

We have been trying to update our Windows installation instructions so if you spot issues with that do let us know.

Dan

Graeme Elliott

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Dec 11, 2019, 8:48:52 AM12/11/19
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this was running locally on a laptop, ubuntu 64bit with i7processor, and 500GB of free disk space.


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Roger Howard

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Dec 11, 2019, 5:07:52 PM12/11/19
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That doesn’t really address the point though - the VM is a virtualized computer, with a certain amount of RAM allocated to it. Within that virtual computer, each process - Apache, MySQL, etc - takes up memory. If the VM isn’t allocated enough memory, then the processes running within it may end up without enough… 

For pdftotext to take 12 minutes to extract text from a mundane PDF, the most likely culprit is memory starvation - that it doesn’t have enough real memory, so it starts using swap, which is orders of magnitude slower than ram.

How much memory does your VM have allocated to it? How much total is available to the laptop itself?

Malaikkannan S

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Dec 11, 2019, 11:51:32 PM12/11/19
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Can you share some screen shot for your failed pdf assets and try with simple pdf file.

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Malaikkannan S

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Dec 12, 2019, 2:06:12 AM12/12/19
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One more thing , please check your php ini setting are correctly configured for file uploads.
https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204404784/how-do-i-increase-the-php-upload-limits  

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 3:37 AM Roger Howard <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:
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Graeme Elliott

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Dec 12, 2019, 2:42:41 PM12/12/19
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I reinstalled a bitnami full stack resource space on my windows laptop (again, an i7 with lots of drive space.)
bitnami-resourcespace-9.1.14019-0-windows-x64-installer.exe

I tried to ingest a pdf ( i am using tiny pdfs, example attached)
ghostscript version installed by bitnami  at localhost did not show pdf previews.  
I then changed the ghostscript path to point at a version installed using the ghostscript installer.  Preview page extraction then works.
#$ghostscript_path = 'C:\resourcespace-9.1.14019-0\common\bin';
$ghostscript_path = 'C:\gs\bin';

bitnami should be advised to use the windows GS installer in the stack.

then I tried pdftotext.  Does not work in a timely fashion and blocks the completion of the upload.  After a too-long wait, i just dismiss RS and open it again. Some bits of the upload seem to be in the database, but it is not useful.
pdftotext was installed by unzipping xpdf-tools-win-4.02.zip and then copying bins to this path:
to this path
#$pdftotext_path='C:\rs_bin\bin32';
#$pdftotext_path='C:/rs_bin/bin32';

finally commented them out, after cycling through the 64 and 32 bit bversions and forward and backslashes.
I can run the attached pdf through pdftotext on the windows command line, works fine.

All of this stuff works OK in my AWS version, a bitnami install of 8.6RS on ubunutu 16.04.  On that machine I ran the installs recommended for antiword, pdfttotext and exiftool  
PDF stuff does not work on a google cloud platform debian based bitnami full stack install.  Which I blew away after testing that it fails to work out-of-the-box there.

The pdfs I am using are small KB and low MB sizes.    




On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 2:06:12 AM UTC-5, Malaikkannan S wrote:
One more thing , please check your php ini setting are correctly configured for file uploads.
https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204404784/how-do-i-increase-the-php-upload-limits  

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 3:37 AM Roger Howard <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:
That doesn’t really address the point though - the VM is a virtualized computer, with a certain amount of RAM allocated to it. Within that virtual computer, each process - Apache, MySQL, etc - takes up memory. If the VM isn’t allocated enough memory, then the processes running within it may end up without enough… 

For pdftotext to take 12 minutes to extract text from a mundane PDF, the most likely culprit is memory starvation - that it doesn’t have enough real memory, so it starts using swap, which is orders of magnitude slower than ram.

How much memory does your VM have allocated to it? How much total is available to the laptop itself?

On Dec 11, 2019, at 8:48 AM, Graeme Elliott <gellio...@gmail.com> wrote:

this was running locally on a laptop, ubuntu 64bit with i7processor, and 500GB of free disk space.


On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 6:37 PM Roger Howard <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:


> On Dec 10, 2019, at 5:17 PM, Graeme Elliott <gellio...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> the problem may be due to pdftotext.  Note it took 12 minutes to extract text in this log, if  am reading it correctly.

That’s *really* long. Is the VM this is running on starved for memory?


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102mm_WideView_52270.pdf

Roger Howard

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Dec 12, 2019, 3:47:26 PM12/12/19
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If you’re looking for advice:

1. Ditch Bitnami. It’s unnecessary and not maintained by anyone here as far as I know - they are a third-party who takes open source products and repackages them.
2. Don’t bother trying to host RS in Windows - it’s possible, as is everything, but this is a classic LAMP stack product. Run it in a Linux VM on Windows if you must, but don’t run it in Windows.

I’ve done dozens of RS installs on both local and AWS/GC VMs, mostly running the latest LTS of Ubuntu, but I’ve done a few Debian installs too. The existing installation directions on the RS site are generally fine for most distros, but stick to home turf - Ubuntu LTS and you’ll do fine.

If you’re asking for how to get Bitnami working properly on Windows… I dunno. But I did ask several times how much RAM was available and you keep responding with disk space. If pdftotext is taking a long time, but eventually completing, with the sample file you just shared I’d still suspect you’ve got a low memory (RAM) condition that’s causing pdftotext to have to swap.

-R

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<102mm_WideView_52270.pdf>

Malaikkannan S

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Dec 17, 2019, 12:32:32 AM12/17/19
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Hi,

I just tested with your provided test file its working fine for me in my Window 10 machine.I can get thumbnails for that, PFA. Please check your ImageMagick and Gs has configured properly.
image.png
image.png

Graeme Elliott

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Dec 17, 2019, 2:52:07 PM12/17/19
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yes, it works fine for me  in windows 10, for page previews and thumbs as long as I do NOT turn on pdftotext.  IM and GS are configured correctly.  pdftotext path is set correctly. If I turn on pdftotext in config.php, pdftotext is invoked up to 6 times and there is significant churn in mysql code re keywords.  log was attached showing this.  pdftotext matters to me.  goal is to be able to search for strings in the body of the text of a document (though I am not sure how the mysql db is configured to handle that search, I did not see a fulltext index).


On Tuesday, December 17, 2019 at 12:32:32 AM UTC-5, Malaikkannan S wrote:
Hi,

I just tested with your provided test file its working fine for me in my Window 10 machine.I can get thumbnails for that, PFA. Please check your ImageMagick and Gs has configured properly.
image.png
image.png

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 2:17 AM Roger Howard <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:
If you’re looking for advice:

1. Ditch Bitnami. It’s unnecessary and not maintained by anyone here as far as I know - they are a third-party who takes open source products and repackages them.
2. Don’t bother trying to host RS in Windows - it’s possible, as is everything, but this is a classic LAMP stack product. Run it in a Linux VM on Windows if you must, but don’t run it in Windows.

I’ve done dozens of RS installs on both local and AWS/GC VMs, mostly running the latest LTS of Ubuntu, but I’ve done a few Debian installs too. The existing installation directions on the RS site are generally fine for most distros, but stick to home turf - Ubuntu LTS and you’ll do fine.

If you’re asking for how to get Bitnami working properly on Windows… I dunno. But I did ask several times how much RAM was available and you keep responding with disk space. If pdftotext is taking a long time, but eventually completing, with the sample file you just shared I’d still suspect you’ve got a low memory (RAM) condition that’s causing pdftotext to have to swap.

-R

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/resourcespace/9869665e-aa5e-49e8-8641-d4e92c1ab1e3%40googlegroups.com.
<102mm_WideView_52270.pdf>

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