TableofContents([2])

Introduction

Describe OxCLIC remote collections here.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.

To test MDID's remote collections capability, one attempted to establish a connection between the two, with oxclic.oucs connecting to the hoa2 collection houses on oxclic2.oucs.

The instructions above were easy to follow, with two exceptions:

#To the layman, the difference between a subnet and a mask is confusing. Armed only with the IP address of oxclic.oucs, where should this data be entered, and what should go in the other field?

• #*In the end, 255.255.252.0 was entered as the Subnet and 163.1.3.18 as the Mask.

#When setting up the remote collection on oxclic.oucs, what data should be entered into the Resource Path field? How does this differ from the Remote URL?

• #*The Remote URL was entered as http://oxclicREMOTE:oxclicREMOTE@oxclic2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/,6

Setting up the user to allow the remote collection was simple. The user is added in exactly the same way as one would enter any normal user.

*Username: oxclicREMOTE *Password: oxclicREMOTE

Searching and Browsing

However, even though the oxclicREMOTE user has been given the appropriate privileges, and the remote collection has been added to the oxclic.oucs server, browsing the collection does not appear as an option, and the search (while an option) does not return results on any searches.

This could be explained by a failure in connection (perhaps the subnet/mask problem?) except that the oxclic.oucs server does recognise that the remote collection is present; it is connected in some manner, because it is listed on the 'Collection Overview' page (including listing the correct number of records).

Interestingly, the number of records also disappears from this page occasionally, seemingly with no apparent user-inputted changes to the configuration of either server.