Note: This version of the VDT (1.6.1) is no longer supported. Feel free to look through the documentation and install it, but we cannot guarantee support for it. The current stable release is 2.0.0.

Advanced Installation Tips

Preservation configuration from an old installation

If you have previously installed the VDT in a different location, you can have the new VDT pick up configuration information while you do the installation. Before you run the Pacman command to install the VDT, set OLD_VDT_LOCATION in your environment to point at the old installation. For example:

> pwd
/opt/vdt-1.6.1
> export OLD_VDT_LOCATION=/opt/vdt-1.3.11   # Note it is a full pathname
> pacman -get http://vdt.cs.wisc.edu/vdt_161_cache:VDT

We have added the ability to copy some configuration from an old VDT Currently, we preserve configuration for GUMS, VOMS, and EDG-MakeGridmap. We chose to focus on these because they are the hardest for most people to preserve by hand: GUMS and VOMS have MySQL databases in addition to configuration files. As time permits, we will expand the configuration that we can preserve. If you have any components that you think we should address first, please let us know.

• For GUMS, we can preserve configuration from VDT 1.3.9 and later
• For VOMS, we can preserve configuration from VDT 1.3.7 and later
• For EDG-Make-Gridmap, any version of the VDT

Note that we also preserve the questions: your answers to all questions are copied from the old installation, and you are not asked any questions that you previously answered.

Modify Pacman's setup scripts

Before you can use the components in the VDT, you need to source one of the setup scripts, either setup.sh or setup.csh, as appropriate for your shell. (We'll refer to both of these as setup.SHELL for convenience.) Some people like to modify the environment that is constructed, but you should not modify setup.SHELL. Instead, there are three other places that you can insert modifications, and they wil be picked up by setup.SHELL. In each case, you'll add or edit files, and you should make your edits for both Bourne shell (.sh) and C-Shell (.csh).

• Make a directory named $VDT_LOCATION/pre-setup/ and put any number of .SHELL files into it. These will be sourced before anything else in setup.SHELL. Note that this only works with Pacman 3.19 and later.
• Make a directory named $VDT_LOCATION/post-setup/ and put any number of .SHELL files into it. These will be sourced after anything else in setup.SHELL. Note that this only works with Pacman 3.19 and later.
• Edit $VDT_LOCATION/vdt/etc/vdt-local-setup.SHELL. This is sourced somewhere in the middle of setup.SHELL. It's not as useful as the previous two options, but it remains for historical purposes.

Understand VDT file backups

When the VDT is installed or vdt-control is executed, some configuration files may be edited, particularly system files like the xinetd configuration files in /etc/xinetd.d. Backups of these files are saved, but they are saved within $VDT_LOCATION. To be precise:

• Backups of files from $VDT_LOCATION are stored in $VDT_LOCATION/backup/vdt.
• Backups for files from outside of $VDT_LOCATION are stored in $VDT_LOCATION/backup/root.