.:Totally:. Installation

Here's a few thoughts on installing Totally.

Each copy will come with and install both the Firebird RDBMS and a pre-configured database so that it can be used straight away (unless I can figure out a way of getting the installer to only install the RDBMS if the user selects it)

If Totally is installed on all workstations within a LAN, then there are going to be multiple database servers running. This is probably not a good thing, but for standalone workstations, not needing to connect to a database across the LAN, this is required.

I think the best way to solve this is, when each user changes the connection to use the networked version of the database, then it should stop the rdbms service on that workstation. Or maybe, for failsafe, keep it running - for example, should the networked database not be available for some reason, then each workstation could have their own locally synced version.

Hmm - need some replication here! Oops - this is getting big. But there is replication software available? Yes I think so.

Oh well, forget about that for the time being.

To change the connection from the local database to the networked one then, there needs to be an option or a preferences dialog where the end user can change to the networked version.

It should enumerate all the LAN machines, and let the user select one. The connection string in the Totally.INI file should then point to the networked version of the database - but we still have a problem in determining the actual path to the db on the "server".

Perhaps Totally should also install a "listener" app that "knows" about the location of the database on that particular machine. When the user changes connections, it can query all the listeners - the listener will tell the workstation where the db resides on the server machine.

This is good, but how to install and run the listener service? Put it in the HKLM\....\Run key of the registry so it always starts up? Yes, that sounds fine.

Perhaps Totally can do it itself - instead of the listener. Yes, this is better. Totally needs to be running on the "server" machine anyway so that it can accept Jabber requests from the outside world - (for the publish / subscribe facility) which means any firewalls in place will have to forward Jabber port requests to the server on which Totally is running. Hmmm - that means the local LAN admin needs to do some setting up.

Oh well, for now, we'll just have to implement it using Internet Connection Sharing and ZoneAlarm - no external hardware firewall - need to write up some docs for that.

But wasn't one of the tenets of Totally going to be "Napster for business"? I can run PSI as a Jabber client, and I can still communicate via my LAN gateway machine, so Totally shouldn't have a problem either. NAT/ICS will take care of that for me. So it seems to be ok from a hardware firewall point of view also?

Need to do some more investigating.