Introduction
One of the benefits of MDID is that it allows collections housed externally (not on the user's MDID server) to be accessed, browsed, searched &c. from another MDID server. These remote collections are easily established, requiring users with admin privileges on each server (the server housing the collection, and the server that wishes to access it remotely) only a few options to be configured within MDID's web-based administration panel.
MDID and remote collections
Setup Instructions from MDID
Follow the steps below to share one of your collections with other MDID2 users.
Create a user account for the organization that wants to access your collection. Make sure the login you chose does not conflict with any of your regular user. Set a password for the account.
Grant read permissions to the user account for the target collection. Without this, the remote collection will not work. You will probably want to grant the Full-size Image Access permission as well.
Share the collection by going to the collection property screen and clicking on Sharing. Enter the login name of the account you created and the subnet and mask of the MDID2 server that will access the collection.
Pass the remote URL of the collection to the organization that wants access. The remote URL is listed on the collection property screen. Replace username and password with the appropriate login name and password of the account you created.
Accessing a shared remote collection
To access a shared collection, create a new remote collection in your MDID2 system. Enter the remote URL you receive from the organization hosting the shared collection into the collection properties of the collection you just created. Make sure you received a valid username and password.
The collection will be available for searching immediately.
Problems
The oxclic.oucs server is faster, but does not contain any images. The oxclic2.oucs server is old, but contains many images. Setting up MDID's remote collection capability involves 2 steps
Server
On the server you need to share the collection. From the Collection Properties page, choose Sharing.
The Username should be a valid username on the server, and it should at least have permission to read this collection. The IP address of the remote (client) computer that will be accessing the collection goes in the subnet field. The subnet mask should be 255.255.255.0, unless you know some reason why it should not.
From the Collection Properties page, you will have a Remote URL field, which will need to be edited and entered into the client in the steps below.
Client
On the client you need to create a New Remote collection. The Resource Path field should point to an empty directory on the client itself. This directory will hold the cache of images obtained from the remote server - they will be held in a series of folders called thumb, medium and full.?
Once you have created the collection you should enter the Remote URL from the server's Collection Properties page. You will need to enter the correct username and password as defined on the server. Remember that for the Oxford implementation you may need to specify an alternate port.
http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@oxclic.oucs.ox.ac.uk/,9
Searching and Browsing
You can only Search a remote collection. Browsing would require too much in the way of system resources. The transaction log can give you a few clues if something does not work correctly, though it is pretty cryptic.
Interestingly, the number of records also disappears from this page occasionally, seemingly with no apparent user-inputted changes to the configuration of either server.