Hi, Under the Oil for Development program, NORAD is helping the Ugandan Environmental sector to monitor the changes in the environment that are related to the recent findings of oil in some of the most sensitive areas of Uganda.
Last week there was a training with GIS profesionals from the Forest Authority, Ministry of Water, Environment Authority etc. About 20 people participated. Ragnvald Larsen from NORAD, Ketty Adoch and myself from Mountbatten shared our Geonode knowledge. Instead of the recommended server with 6GB of memory, we opted for an atom based portable media center PC with 2GB of memory. http://www.advance.no/Item.aspx?id=4901512 We installed the current geonode release from the apt-packages. We connected everyone to a local LAN with a wireless router and started. The router was connected to a (very slow, maybe 256k) internet connection. With this setup, we experienced the following issues. We are aware that there is a brandnew version soon to be released, and that some of the issues mentioned could very well have been solved already. Still, for people who would like to train in similar conditions, this might be worthwhile: - Not suprisingly, we had performance issues. We had most performance issues on the first day. Especially in the morning, when we althogether uploaded shapefiles. Processortime on the server maxed out at 400% and kept there for a long long time. A second factor might have been the slow internet connection and the overload of timed out http sessions to the Internet and the Geoserver that used all resources on the Wireless Router. The router didnt have any statistics, so this was not so straightforward to diagnose. (tip: use WRT on your wireless router) After lunch, when we started on creating maps and styling them, the system became much more responsive. - During the styling session people created their own maps, and started styling layers. During this exercise at some point, layers that where shared between maps got corrupted. People might have edited eachothers styles (they looked very similar), but what surely happened was that 2 layers lost their default SLD in geoserver. This renders some pages in geonode useless and causes all sorts of errors. Going into geoserver and assigning a (pretty random) default style to the layer fixes this. - On other geonode installations we had already seen that sometimes when an upload fails, a geonode layer might be in the geonode database, but is not present in geoserver (the whole table is missing). I think Jude is working on some code to straighten this out when it happens. Would be great if an admin/user could do this from the geonode gui. - On the second day, we brought a second server. It ran fine for about 30 minutes, then there was a powersurge (yeah, those happen in Uganda.) After the power came back, tomcat would not finish starting. The attached catalina.out sample shows the full startup sequence. The server never finishes indexing. Could it be that: -- the indexing is not 100% necessary during training? -- the indexing is causing the very high load during uploading data sessions? If so, is there a way to switch off the indexing? That would save a lot of trainers in locations where you can not use "the cloud" during training sessions a lot of headaches of running around with server-size hardware. Enough about problems. At the end of the second day, we workshopped around uses of geonode, and one of the questions asked was: How could geonode be improved? The top 5 was: 1. More data analysis tools 2. display attribute table 3. enable layer grouping 4. connection to social sites like facebook and linkedIn 5. minimise error bugs. And in random order the rest of the list was: Improve tools for styling more admin control in user editing application compatibility include a timeline for map edits include print layout ability to download backdrop for a region(facilitates for offline) use standard GIS terms make it easier to make groups help feature for frequently asked questions having the legend directly on the map. These are the raw items, they also tell something about the training we did. We did not cover the printing part, some people might have missed the current legend, we later showed some advanced users how to load peoples own styled WMS layers in ArcGIS & QGIS (to the exitement of the trainees). And, while at it, maybe i could at 2 of my personal favorites (Withouth knowledge of 1.2): - Import Geoserver layers into Geonode. This is especially useful for very big geotiffs and for remote WFS layers. - Slightly more userfriendly errormessages would be great. I know Tomcat spits out lists and lists of errors, but having a slight clue of where in the process things broke helps diagnose issues a lot. In general, we love Geonode. Its very relevant in the Ugandan context. A lot of the discussion here is still about the actual sharing of data. There is a great level of reluctance. Using Geonode to show how easy it can become to mix & match data makes the advantage of sharing your data a lot more concrete for people. Commercial drilling for oil is not expected to start before 2017. until then, Reinier Battenberg
catalinaout_brokenserver.txt.tar.gz
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