Looks pretty slick... but all of our materials are written for windows 
users. Unless i am mistaken this is only feasible in a linux environment?

Arne Kepp wrote:
> Most LiveCD's use something called UnionFS [1] that should fix this, 
> essentially it makes a read-only filesystem act like a regular 
> filesystem by copying changed files to RAM.  If the machines have 1Gb or 
> more, and we tell Java to user 256 to 512, we should be good.
> 
> I'd use https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD as the starting point, 
> there's also a track for LiveCDPersistence which can use a USB stick for 
> storage.
> 
> -Arne
> 
> 1: http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html
> 
> Justin Deoliveira wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is something that has been floating around in my head for quite 
>> some time and I wanted to throw some ideas out and see what people 
>> think of them.
>>
>> So the use case here is be able to run GeoServer "live", that is 
>> straight off a CD or a USB stick. The problem is however that, as many 
>> know, GeoServer needs write access to be able to run. Now with a USB 
>> stick with enough space on it this is not an issue, but after a recent 
>> bad experience with USB sticks in labs, not having a CD to fall back 
>> on is suicide in my opinion :).
>>
>> To find the instances I started GeoServer with an unwritable data 
>> directory and it blew up with issues related to logging, writable file 
>> checks, data like shapefiles locking and writing out index files, and 
>> more.
>>
>> Past startup there is also the obvious fact that without a writable 
>> data directory there would be no ability to save any changes made via 
>> the web ui. Not ideal in a workshop situation.
>>
>> So... my thought about the easiest way to get around this situation 
>> would be to somehow tell GeoServer to use the temporary O/S space, or 
>> use the users home directory for the data dir.
>>
>> My first thought on how to do this is to use "special" values for the 
>> GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR parameter. Something like:
>>
>> -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[TMP] or -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[HOME]
>>
>> Then the GeoServerDataDirectory.init() method would recognize these 
>> values and set the data directory path accordingly.
>>
>> So continuing on with this, what about content inside the data 
>> directory? If you start geoserver with an "empty" data directory it 
>> still chokes. So my thought was to have GeoServerDataDirectory.init() 
>> not only set the path based on the special values, but also initialize 
>> the directory structure (only on the first run of course).
>>
>> It seems logical to me to just use the minimal data directory in this 
>> case, which is just a skeleton catalog.xml and services.xml, and 4 sld 
>> files. However... in a workshop situation this is also not ideal, 
>> since we are going to want people to have a data directory which has 
>> been pre-configured.
>>
>> So my thought to get around this would be to support an additional 
>> startup parameter, called something like 
>> "GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR_TEMPLATE". The value of the parameter is a path to 
>> a data directory... however instead of using that path directly, the 
>> behavior is instead to copy the contents of it to temporary O/S space 
>> / home directory. So startup would look something like:
>>
>> -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=[TMP] 
>> -DGEOSERVER_DATA_DIR_TEMPLATE=E:\GeoServer\data_dir
>>
>> End of rant. Feedback welcome :).
>>
>> -JD
>>
>>   
> 


-- 
Justin Deoliveira
Software Engineer, OpenGeo
http://opengeo.org

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