Additional Installation Considerations
- Hannah Petty
In this section:
Publish to CMS/LMS/VLE Systems
EchoSystem provides native support for publishing presentation links into CMS/LMS/VLE systems. See Publishing for instructions on installing additional software, the publishing process, and publisher configuration.
Firewall Requirements
See Firewall Requirements for Installation.
System Imaging - Classroom Capture
When using system imaging or configuration management suites such as Faronics Deep Freeze, you must configure the tool so that Classroom Capture is allowed access to key directories and files, and must have capture storage directories that are not automatically purged/cleared by other applications. The critical directories are shown in the table below.
Access needed for... | Default Location | When used |
|---|---|---|
Program files | c:\Program Files\Echo360\Client\ | during upgrades and patches |
Content | c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Echo360\Client\task | temporary location during a capture |
Content backup | c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Echo360\Client\saved-content | after upload |
Configuration files | c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Echo360\config (and all subdirectories) | at any time |
Two registry entries are created during the installation of the Classroom Capture software. These registry entries do not normally change during the course of use of Classroom Capture.
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Echo360\Client\DataDir
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Echo360\Client\ProgramDir
Classroom Capture - Executables Footprint
The following table lists the executable files for Classroom Capture, along with the amount of space they use both on the disk and in memory.
Program | Function | Size on disk (MB) | Size in memory (MB) |
|---|---|---|---|
echo_capture_software_ntservice.exe | capture | 1.2 MB | 1.3 MB |
echo_task_manager.exe | restarting applications | 1.5 MB | 5.1 MB |
echo_system_status.exe | system status | 900 KB | 4.4 MB |
echo_upload_content.exe | uploading content | 1.6 MB | 3.3 MB |
echo_upload_log.exe | uploading logs | 1.6 MB | 4.1 MB |
echo_adhoc_control.exe | ad hoc UI controls | 1.6 MB | 3.6 MB |
Configure Virus Scanners
The EchoSystem creates, moves, and manages many different files as it prepares presentations for students. These files are moved between system components several times during processing.
On-access features available with anti-virus programs can be configured to scan every file that is created, modified or accessed on a given volume. This means that:
- Certain files will be scanned multiple times on the same system
- Scanning may slow ESS performance to an unacceptable level
Best Practice: Modify the On-Access Scanner
Echo360 recommends modifying the on-access scanner in the antivirus program used on the ESS. You can:
- Disable the on-access scanner completely.
- Tell the scanner to skip (that is, not to scan) files used by EchoSystem applications. Use this method if your antivirus program allows you to do so.
If you can specify files that should be skipped, specify the files listed in the table below. The following table lists the file type, the file type extension, and the EchoSystem application that uses that file type.
File Type | Extension | EchoSystem Applications |
|---|---|---|
Flash Video movie | .flv | EchoPlayer |
Flash SWF movie | .swf | EchoPlayer |
Thumbnail and flipbook images | .jpg | EchoPlayer |
MP3 audio | .mp3 | Podcast |
MPEG-4 video | .m4v | Vodcast |
Capture appliance raw video & visual content | .h264 | Content digital masters |
Classroom Capture raw visual content & | .mov | Content digital masters |
Personal Capture for Windows raw video and | .wmv | Content digital masters |
Raw audio content | .aac | Content digital masters |
Raw wrapper files | .mp4, .m4a | Media preparation |
Supporting files | .xml | Media preparation |
Log files | .yaml | Capture device logging |
Log files | .log | System logging |
Transfer completion recognition | .complete | FTP / SFTP |
External Web Server Configuration for Live Chat
If you use the Jetty web server provided with the ESS distribution, this section does not apply to you
If you have configured an external web server, such as Apache or Microsoft IIS, you may need to make a small change in the web server configuration.
If all of the following statements apply to your system, you must make the configuration change described:
- You are using an external Apache or IIS web server
- You are using live webcasting to deliver some content
- You have the Collaboration and Statistics Service, which allows you to use the chat feature of live webcasting
- A chat participant (student or Academic Staff) might use international (non-English) characters for chat text, including accented characters as in French or Spanish
All chat text from a live webcast is packaged and posted as a chat log along with the Echo generated for the webcast. The default configurations for Apache and IIS web servers do not recognize international characters and will not display them when delivering the text/html file of the chat log. These characters in the chat log then appear as nonsense or "garbage" characters, making the chat log illegible.
To solve this problem, you must configure the web server to serve files with the extension ".chatlog" using the MIME type "text/plain;charset=UTF-8". This ensures that the web server can tell the browser to display the chat log using the UTF-8 character set, which should render all international characters correctly.
For Apache, add the following line to the httpd.conf file (or equivalent configuration file; the name of the file may differ depending on your particular build of Apache):
AddType 'text/html;charset=utf-8' chatlog
For more information, see the following article on the Apache website: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_mime.html .
For IIS, the following article provides instructions for adding MIME elements: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725608%28v=ws.10%29.aspx. Use the information from the article and substitute the following values:
- The value to use for the filename extension is:
.chatlog - The value to use for the MIME type text box is:
text/plain;charset=utf8
Best Practice - Establish a Temporary Storage Location
When you reprocess a file or edit media, the ESS makes a copy of the original file and stores it in the .tmp directory. The ESS takes this precaution so the original file can be recovered if the reprocess or edit operation fails. However, it is possible for the .tmp directory to become full. Especially when the echo being edited or reprocessed is very long (3 hours or more), and/or users are editing the echo and using the Save as New option.
To avoid this possibility, we recommend that you edit the wrapper.conf file to establish a temporary storage location when you install the server. This storage location should have sufficient space to store temporary copies of multiple echoes, and a minimum of 15 GB is recommended.
The default storage locations are not exposed (not explicitly listed) in the wrapper.conf file. When you add the lines of code below, you specify, and explicitly list, the storage locations.
- Navigate to {ESS_HOME}/etc/. In a Windows system, {ESS_Home} might translate to <Install Location>/echo360/server/etc.
- Open the wrapper.conf file in a text editor.
- You will be typing a statement in the form java.additional.<unique number>=<some value>. You will need to type a unique number, that is, a number that has not already been used in other java.additional...statements.
- Search the wrapper file for statements in that form to determine which numbers have already been used.
- Make a mental note of the unique number you will use.
- Add the following lines of code to the file:
For Linux - where /var in the statement below is the location of the data partition:
wrapper.java.additional.<unique number>=-Decho.app.temp.dir=/var/echo360/temp
For Windows - where d:\ in the statement below is the location of the data partition:
wrapper.java.additional.<unique number>=-Decho.app.temp.d:\echo360\temp
- When finished, save and close the file.
- Restart the ESS.