Enterprise Edition - Early Access Program

Installation

Poseidon for UML Enterprise Edition EAP has two components, the server and the client. The client is a complete modeling environment that can be used either stand-alone or in collaborative mode using a connection to the Enterprise Server, while the server contains everything needed to manage collaborations and projects and deploy changes to active project to all involved clients. However, we are using one single executable installer for both.

This section describes the installation process. For the server installation, the installation program should be executed under the user that will run the Enterprise Server later. The client installation must be run on each machine and for each user that will use this software. As the differences between the server and client installation are transparent to the user, only one description is given here.

Install the Client Application

The client software is installed via the installer program (PoseidonEE_<version>Installer). Depending on the local operating system, it can be started by double-clicking on its icon or calling the file from the command line. The installer will open a new window, presenting all the information needed during the installation process.

The first thing you will encounter while running the installer is a warning that this software is an early access version of Poseidon for UML Enterprise Edition and is not meant for production use. Please take this warning very seriously. Project corruption and changes to file formats are not intended, but can happen due to the pre-production state of the software.

After clicking the 'Next' button, the License and Early Access Agreement will be presented to you. You can either accept the agreement by clicking the 'I accept ...' button followed by the 'Next' button, or reject it by clicking the 'Cancel' button. Please read the agreement carefully before you decide which button to click. If you decide to reject the agreement, the installer will end without installing the software.

The 'Choose Alias Folder' screen allows you to decide where aliases for faster access to Poseidon should be created on your system. Although we recommend keeping the default settings, you can also choose other options or skip alias creation completely. Aliases for starting and uninstalling the software, the User Guide, and the FAQ will be created at the specified location.

A new screen will present a summary of the settings to be used, and the installer application will install Poseidon for UML Enterprise Edition EAP to the default software installation folder for your operating system. By pressing 'Install' you confirm that the installation process should continue. The installer will start copying files to your system.

Once the installer has finished, you can start the Poseidon Enterprise Edition client application directly from the installer program (note that this will not start the server application) or exit the installer and manually start the client application.

Install the Server Application

Installing the Enterprise Server is very much the same. We recommend creating a new, dedicated user that will install and run the Enterprise Server. The user name and password of this user is needed for a correct setup at the client side (see next chapter). Therefore, using the account information of an existing, real user is considered insecure.

First Start

This section will detail how to run the server and client for the first and subsequent times (I'm assuming that the first start requires some configuration that will not be necessary on the second and all further startups).

Starting the Server

Before the Enterprise Server can be started for the first time, some adjustments must be made to the server properties. The properties can be found in the file poseidon2/EE/CollabServer.properties in the user’s home folder. The following entries are available (all of them starting with 'collabserver.'):

  • queue.refresh.size - Number of events handled for one collaboration before the entrance of a new client to the collaboration forces temporary saving of the project. Use a smaller number than the default setting only if entering the collaboration late costs too much time or you have a slow network connection to the server.

  • project.extension - File extension of the project files. Never change this value!

  • project.file.location - Folder where project files are saved to and loaded from by the Enterprise Server. This folder has to be accessible for the user running the server.

  • temp.file.location - Folder where temporary files are stored to by the Enterprise Server. This folder has to be accessible for the user running the server.

  • server.debugCommandExecution - Logs execution messages for each executed command. For debug purposes only.

  • server.debugCommandHandling - Logs messages about command transmission. For debug purposes only.

  • server.debugLocking - Logs messages about the locking system behavior. For debug purposes only.

The Enterprise Server can be started from the command-line only. The script startCollaborationServer.[bat|sh] will bring up the core server component and the RMI infrastructure needed to run the Enterprise Server. Depending on the server settings, it is possible that a new background Poseidon instance is started automatically.

If starting a background Poseidon fails with an exception coming from the RMI activation system, removing the log subfolder in the folder from which the start script is executed will solve this problem in most of the cases. The problem usually occurs only when the server machine changes its address (which can happen, particularly in DHCP-aware environments).

Make sure that the machine running the Enterprise Server has an SSH-Server running (e.g. sshd on Linux systems), otherwise starting collaboration based on existing project files will fail. Please see the following chapter for details about how to configure the SSH environment for the Enterprise Server.

If, for some reason, it becomes necessary to shut down the server, the script stopServer.[bat|sh] will execute this task. Any client connected to the Enterprise Server will receive a notification that the server is about to shut down. Active collaborations will be closed and their content will be saved to the corresponding project files. Additionally, the RMI activation system will be stopped.

Starting the Client

Once the installation is done, the client can be started either from the alias created during the installation process (e.g. on the desktop) or by using the start script (<installation folder>/bin/poseidon.[bat|sh]). For the EAP, a valid license for the client is already included.

Before you can connect to the Enterprise Server, some additional settings must be entered. Open the settings dialog (Edit->Settings) and choose the 'Enterprise' tab. Ftp-username and ftp-password are used to establish a secure connection between the client application and the Enterprise Server. The ftp-username is the name of the user running the Enterprise Server on the server machine. The ftp-password is the password of that user. If you don’t know this information, ask your server administrator.

To change the password, press the 'Change Password' button. This will open up a new dialog asking you for the old password, a new password, and a retype of the new password (to avoid problems encountered through mis-typing). None of the password fields will show the password as plain text. If you are setting the password for the first time, the default value for the old password is 'password'. As using this password is considered insecure, change the password as soon as possible, even when you don’t intend to connect to the Enterprise Server immediately.

Press the 'Change Password' button in the password dialog to evaluate your input and return to the settings dialog. (Due to a known bug in window management, the settings dialog might be hidden in the background.) Press 'OK' in the settings dialog to apply the changes. Now you are ready to make your first connection to the Enterprise Server.

In order to start your first collaboration with the Enterprise Server, choose Enterprise->Connect to Server from the menu. In the field 'Username', enter a name the server can use to identify you. We recommend using your username, but any name is valid as long as it is unique to the server and does not contain whitespace.

From the combo box below, select the appropriate server. If this list is empty, add the new server to the combo box by clicking the 'Edit server-list' button and entering the server details. Servers are identified by their network identification, either the logical machine name or the IP address in dotted format. If you don’t know the address of your local server, ask your system administrator.

Once you have successfully connected to the Enterprise Server, the Collaboration-Management dialog will open. In the upper part, you will find a list of the currently active collaborations and their participants. You can choose to join one of them by selecting it from the list and pressing the 'Join selected collaboration' button. You can also start your own collaboration by pressing 'Create collaboration'. In the upcoming dialog you will be asked for the name of the new collaboration. Please make sure that the name is unique to the server and that it doesn’t contain whitespace.

In the lower part of the dialog, you will find a list of projects known to the Enterprise Server. You can start a collaboration based on one of these projects by selecting it and pressing 'Load and start selected project'.

The initialization of the collaboration might take some time, depending on the size of the collaboration. Once the initialization is finished, you are part of a live collaboration and can start sharing your modeling experience and ideas with others.

SSH Server

In order to allow file transfers between the Enterprise Server and the clients, an SSH server must be running on the server machine. Many systems (especially those running any kind of *NIX operating system) will already have an implementation of SSH installed. If the machine designated for the Enterprise Server has been used as workstation before, it is very likely that the SSH server isn’t started automatically

SSH Configuration

In order to allow file transfers between the Enterprise Server and the clients, an SSH server must be running on the server machine. Many systems (especially those running any kind of *NIX operating system) will already have an implementation of SSH installed. If the machine designated for the Enterprise Server has been used as workstation before, it is very likely that the SSH server isn’t started automatically.

For systems that do not have an SSH server installed, we provide an open-source implementation of the SSH protocol along with the Enterprise Edition EAP. The implementation is based on OpenSSH and offers its own installation process through a self-extracting executable (see below). For Windows, a small Unix environment (reduced cygwin) is installed as well. If you are not sure if there is an existing SSH server installed (and running) on the server machine, ask your system administrator. Asking the system administrator before installing the OpenSSH package is recommended as well.

Once the SSH server is up and running on the server machine, some basic tweaking of the SSH environment has to be done. The following settings must be made (if you don’t know where to change the settings, asking your system administrator might be a good idea; for those want to do it on their own anyway, the configuration file is located in /etc/sshd-config or <openssh-installation-folder>/etc/sshd-config):

  • PasswordAuthentication yes

  • PasswordAuthentication yes

  • PermitEmptyPasswords no

  • RSAAuthentication no

  • Protocol 2,1

  • Port 22

Most of these settings are the default settings for the configuration. At the minimum, the RSAAuthentication must be set to 'no', otherwise clients will not be able to use project files from the server. If you make changes to the configuration, you will also have to restart the SSH server.

Installing the OpenSSh Server for Windows

If you are installing the OpenSSH server for Windows, please follow the instructions in the readme file to configure the server correctly.

Create the group and password files with the following commands from the \bin directory of the OpenSSH installation directory:

mkgroup -d >> ..\etc\group mkpasswd -d >> ..\etc\passwd

This makes the information about the users in your domain available for the OpenSSH server. If you want to use the local users of your windows system and not the domain users, please use the -l switch instead of the -d switch:

mkgroup -l >> ..\etc\group mkpasswd -l >> ..\etc\passwd

In this case, you have to configure your client with the correct username and password of the local user who is running the server. If you want to have a new local user who runs the server, please create this user before you execute the commands above.

Restart the OpenSSH server now.