Tweak network configurations of OpenGeo Suite Server

geobeyond — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:25:51 +0000

A completely web-based architecture such as the OpenGeo Suite means that a change in the IP address of the server where it is installed impacts radically operations of applications and services. It often happens, however, that the server on which the prototype has been developed becomes a machine directly used in production or even when the network is forced to migrate toward a different configuration then the OGS IP address has to be changed. What does it happen to the deployed applications and how to proceed without having to reinstall all over again?

Base installation of OGS on Windows servers

When installing from scratch the package of the OpenGeo Suite on Windows the applications are deployed into the Jetty container whose configuration drives the way how they are published on the Web (default value for IP address is 127.0.0.1). Therefore assuming that the target address for the OGS server will be for example 192.168.0.10, let’s see what are the steps to follow.

Step 1

Click on Start to go into command shell
Run “Cmd + Enter” and then

cd "C:\Program Files\OpenGeo Suite\etc"

Edit the configuration file for the Jetty server

C:\Program Files\OpenGeo Suite\etc>notepad.exe .\jetty.xml

Change the IP address in the xml

Hereafter a brief introduction (in Italian) of RIOS and at the bottom the link for the registration page to attending the launch event here in Rome.

Il 19 febbraio 2013 a Roma (alle ore 18.00 presso Rec23 www.reteitalianaopensource.net/it/rios-19febbraio) verrà presentata la Rete Italiana Open Source (RIOS), un ecosistema di imprese, fra i principali operatori italiani del settore, che hanno deciso di mettere a fattore comune esperienze, risorse e servizi professionali sui prodotti Open Source.
Promossa da Marco Ciarletti, Flavia Marzano e Carlo Vaccari, RIOS è una realtà che aggrega system integrator e maintainer di prodotti Open Source con oltre 450 addetti e sedi in gran parte del territorio nazionale.Rete Italiana Open Source si presenta al mercato come un nuovo soggetto capace di offrire una gamma completa di soluzioni, in un mercato ICT che oggi vede l’Open Source come uno dei pochi settori in costante crescita per gli evidenti vantaggi che offre (investire unicamente per i servizi professionali ricevuti, contrastare la sindrome del “vendor lock-in”, abbattere i costi di progetto pur puntando a soluzioni di altissima qualità e leader di mercato).
L’obiettivo di RIOS è quello di essere un punto di riferimento in Italia per Aziende, Pubbliche Amministrazioni Centrali e Locali, Public Utilities, System Integrator e chiunque intenda godere appieno dei benefici dell’Open Source senza rinunciare a sicurezza, servizi, supporto e garanzia di soluzioni di livello Enterprise.
La Rete vanta ampie competenze applicative: dal documentale all’ERP, dalla geolocalizzazione all’e-learning, dalla business intelligence agli open data. Attraverso uno stack di tecnologie Open Source unico in Italia, RIOS offre servizi di storage, infrastructure, middleware fino al cloud e al mobile. RIOS offre approcci “smart consulting” che possono dare risultati in tempi brevi, grazie al know-how acquisito in anni di esperienza con clienti nazionali ed internazionali. In un mercato dove il capitale umano e le competenze diventano prioritarie, RIOS sposta l’asse dalla competizione alla collaborazione, mettendo a disposizione soluzioni integrate, un’esperienza più che ventennale nel mercato dell’ICT, l’utilizzo di metodologie agili di progettazione e sviluppo.
Tutte le informazioni sulle aziende che costituiscono RIOS e sull’offerta di riferimento sono reperibili sul sito www.reteitalianaopensource.net.

SnowMonit wins GMES Masters Best Service Challenge

geobeyond — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:23:22 +0000

A service designed to improve natural resource management and detect hydropower generation and areas at risk of drought was selected by an online audience as the winner in one of seven categories of the GMES Masters competition.

The GMES Masters competition awards prizes for the best projects and business ideas involving commercial Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) applications. Its purpose is to support the development of market-oriented applications that use data from the programme.
While experts are still assessing the proposals submitted in six of the 2012 GMES Masters categories, the winners of the Best Service Challenge have already been selected by the competition’s online audience.

This year, almost 900 visitors to the GMES Masters website voted for the Earth observation service they found most beneficial to European citizens.

The clear winner of the Best Service Challenge 2012 with a total of 3477 votes was SnowMonit – Monitoring Snow and Water Equivalent.

Submitted by the Italian company GeoBeyond Srl, it improves natural resource management and early-warning tools for detecting hydropower generation and areas at risk of drought. It thus addresses the GMES Masters’ focus area of emergency management.

SnowMonit is also designed to integrate and improve current services that treat snow avalanche information, snow accumulation and derived parameters such as snow water equivalent for mapping the management of resources (hydropower, water) and the predictability of mountain hazards.

This near real-time service will be able to raise the situational awareness of nowcasting and forecasting products at the local, regional, and cross-border level.

As the winner of the Best Service Challenge, we will benefit from a substantial satellite data quota made available through financial support from the European Commission.

Our team attended the award ceremony in the marvelous sorroundings of the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche church at Munich together to the rest of GMES competition’s winners.

Adding Geoserver’s extensions to OpenGeo Suite in production

geobeyond — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:18:09 +0000

OpenGeo Suite is smoothly installed in Ubuntu Server as documented here below, except for the database component because each web application is deployed into a Tomcat container. Such deployment is performed by copying the necessary applications installed with the suite to the webapps directory of Tomcat usually located at the following path /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/. Specifically they are located in these directories while the installation is performed:

Component	Web Archive	Path
GeoServer	geoserver.war	/usr/share/opengeo-geoserver/
Dashboard	dashboard.war	/usr/share/opengeo-suite/
GeoWebCache	geowebcache.war	/usr/share/opengeo-suite/
GeoEditor	geoeditor.war	/usr/share/opengeo-suite/
GeoExplorer	geoexplorer.war	/usr/share/opengeo-suite/
Recipes	recipes.war	/usr/share/opengeo-suite/

Tips: If you want to check if the web archives installed are those deployed into Tomcat, execute the md5sum command on each file

First of all, you have to check the Geoserver’s version currently installed by loading its default page available at http://localhost/geoserver. The extension to be downloaded has to correspond accordingly to the above-checked version.

Create a temporary directory in the user home:

$ mkdir geoserver_ext

$ cd geoserver_ext

For example you want to install the new data stores listed below by grabbing:

MySQL Data Store:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/geoserver/geoserver--mysql-plugin.zip

SQL Server Data Store:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/geoserver/geoserver--sqlserver-plugin.zip

Before performing all operations to take over the current installed Geoserver WAR with a more library extension, it is necessary to execute a backup of this version:

$ cd /usr/share/opengeo-geoserver/
$ sudo cp geoserver.war geoserver.war._

Then you can export the original web archive to a temporary directory:

$ sudo mkdir temp_war
$ cd temp_war
$ sudo jar xvf ../geoserver.war

Now it’s time to endorse the library directory with these new extensions:

$ sudo unzip -d . /home/geoserver_ext/geoserver--mysql-plugin.zip
$ sudo unzip -d . /home/geoserver_ext/geoserver--sqlserver-plugin.zip
$ sudo cp *.jar WEB-INF/lib/

At the end of this activity it is necessary to generate the new Web Archive as follows:

$ sudo jar cvf geoserver.war index.html www/ data/ META-INF/ WEB-INF/

Then copy this new geoserver deployment into Tomcat:

$ sudo cp geoserver.war /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/geoserver/

Restart Tomcat and load GeoServer application again. A screen showing a new vector data store for SQL Server will be displayed!

Promoting Stati Generali Innovazione

geobeyond — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:45:30 +0000

A meeting entitled (Stati Generali Innovazione) will be held on 25th-26th November in Rome. It will deal with ICT innovations and how stakeholders can leverage them with policy-maker decisions in terms of rules and sustainability in order to start a new way to define clear resolutions.
The organizing committee asked us to join the source promoters’ group. We accepted this invitation because one of our main aims is to convey our knowledge to the Open Source, Open Data and Open Government community. Moreover, we support OGC standards and their nature of enabling interoperability.
We decided to bring concreteness to the meeting group sessions (with a particular focus on Open Government) and to support them with our hosted OpenGeo Suite. SGI activities will be able to load geographical data in different formats from several sources and merge it in beautiful maps ready to be published and used either as WMS or as WFS services. We provide a complete empty workspace and SGI dedicated users.
We aim at making geospatial happen once more!

OpenGeo Suite Linux Server Installation

geobeyond — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:12:35 +0000

In this post we want to explain how OpenGeo Suite can be easily and rapidly installed in a linux box. We assume to work on Linux but the same can be applied to Windows servers or Mac OS X machines equipped with a specific package.
However, given that we worked with several linux installations and that such installations are the most proper choice for the management in production environment, we now describe how it is easy to install it through an APT-GET repository.
Hereafter is our Ubuntu target server description [as VMware virtual machine on ESXi infrastructure]:

Server	Value
OS	Ubuntu 10.04 Linux 32-bit
Virtual Memory	2 GB
Virtual CPU	1

Run the following command shell as sudo.

First of all, import OpenGeo GPG key by executing:

$ sudo wget -qO- http://apt.opengeo.org/gpg.key | apt-key add -

Tip: Since sometime an error associated with “apt-key” command is displayed, check if some distro treats pipe differently and retype “sudo” or alternatively split that up.

$ sudo wget -qO- http://apt.opengeo.org/gpg.key > gpg.key
$ sudo apt-key add gpg.key

Add the APT repository for OpenGeo Suite:

$ sudo echo "deb http://apt.opengeo.org/ubuntu lucid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Update APT:

$ sudo apt-get update

Execute a search for packages available:

$ sudo apt-cache search opengeo

Tip: The search has to return at least one result otherwise the repository hasn’t been added correctly.

Make OpenGeo Suite package (opengeo-suite) installed:

$ sudo apt-get install opengeo-suite

Post installation

Once the installation process is ended you can display the applications provided by the suite through an Apache Web Server.
To do this, enable a proxy into Apache. First of all, create a suitable configuration for it:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.conf /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.conf
$ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.load
$ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy_http.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy_http.load

Then add a proxy-pass configuration for the local Tomcat container by setting:

$ sudo chmod 666 /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
$ sudo sed -i '$d'  /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
$ sudo sh -c "echo ' ' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyRequests Off' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '# Remember to turn the next line off if you are proxying to a NameVirtualHost' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPreserveHost On' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo ' ' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '    Order deny,allow' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '    Allow from all' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo ' ' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /geoserver http://localhost:8080/geoserver' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /geoserver http://localhost:8080/geoserver' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /geoexplorer http://localhost:8080/geoexplorer' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /geoexplorer http://localhost:8080/geoexplorer' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /geoeditor http://localhost:8080/geoeditor' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /geoeditor http://localhost:8080/geoeditor' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /geowebcache http://localhost:8080/geowebcache' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /geowebcache http://localhost:8080/geowebcache' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /dashboard http://localhost:8080/dashboard' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /dashboard http://localhost:8080/dashboard' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /recipes http://localhost:8080/recipes' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /recipes http://localhost:8080/recipes' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPass /opengeo-docs http://localhost:8080/opengeo-docs' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo 'ProxyPassReverse /opengeo-docs http://localhost:8080/opengeo-docs' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo ' ' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"
$ sudo sh -c "echo '' >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/default"

Alternatively, use the script at this location here.

Finally, restart Apache by executing:

$ sudo service apache2 restart

POAT MiBAC – Ministry of Cultural Heritage

geobeyond — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:21:42 +0000

Network governance for heritage policies

General design of the project was finalised in order to reach a common definition as well as to develop agreements on regional scale in terms of worth and benefit for the cultural heritage.
The first step achieved an analytical study based on a catalog, rules and methods in order to define a landscape geographical context. Areas of interest for this application model had to be those constrained by regulations: coastal bands and mountains.

The previous step ended with the definition of certain thematic layer related to the identified areas.
We were engaged with the second step to meet the requirement of an effective WebGIS able to provide best practices useful to render thematic maps based on sustainable resources such as Open Source software. A further requisite was the need to merge these layers with the existing ones provided by an unknown GIS infrastructure of the relevant SITAP website. Then we discovered it was based on MapServer.

The last requirement was particularly unbalanced compared to the possibility to create an integration and to the wish to realize a new GIS platform compatible with OGC in terms of services offered.
The reasonable choice for us was to deploy the OpenGeo Suite in the Debian Linux box (virtualized) provided by MiBAC as described in our installation and configuration procedures here.

This approach basically covers the requirements in order to pick up layers from heterogeneous sources, however it allows more flexibility and interoperability with reference to new data stores to be added. Indeed, just a few clicks are required to come up with new stuff or remove those no longer suitable for future purposes. As a result, we just added three new GeoServer datastores:

Connections to institutional services distributing several national cartographic layers available through OGC OWS (i.e. PCN Portal, Civil Protection SDI, IGM Portal)
OGC WMS available from SITAP whose capabilities URL is http://sitap.beniculturali.it/cgi-bin/sitap/wms?SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetCapabilities
Shapefiles resulting from the previous analysis step

The selected layers were loaded as basic layers together with Bing imagery into GeoExplorer and exported to a WebGIS application embedded as iFrame into the CMS as follows at this link.

Here below the final resulting mapping application:

OpenGeo partnership

geobeyond — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:16:11 +0000

GeoBeyond Srl have partnered with OpenGeo. This partnership will offer enhanced OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition resell and technical support, and integration services to the SME Italian and European markets.

Check out this Press Release for more details.

OpenGeo is a social enterprise working to build the best web-based geospatial technology. The company brings the best practices of open source software to geospatial organizations around the world by providing enterprises with supported, tested, and integrated open source solutions to build the Geospatial Web.

GeoBeyond will take a lead role in the local expertise to provide robust, reliable and cost-effective open source geospatial solutions.

The OpenGeo Suite is the complete, OGC standards-compliant web mapping platform built on powerful, cutting-edge, open source geospatial components.
It brings together all of them into a single, easy-to-install integrated software package. Being, each individual component, developed individually, we ensure that the Suite integrates with existing systems—proprietary or open source. It is the fastest way to get your geospatial information on the web, leveraging the power of best-of-breed open source geospatial software.

The full stack of OpenGeo Suite is composed by:

GeoServer A map and feature server providing standardized web access to GIS data sources and cartographic quality maps. More
GeoWebCache A web map accelerator, intelligently caching and serving tiles to make maps scale. More
PostGIS A Premier open source spatial relational database fast, robust and full-featured. More
OpenLayers A Industry-standard Javascript map controls for viewing and editing data from multiple sources. More
GeoExt A rich user interface controls for the geospatial web. More

We are glad to support you with it. Drop us an enquiry!

Welcome on board

geobeyond — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 09:13:54 +0000

Why another start-up?

Currently it is not clear where money is going and things do not go right for the business world. Furthermore, it seems that companies are reluctant to invest in the ICT world even if it has been a dominant sector for long, and this does not let us know if it lost its old splendour.

However, there are hints on how businesses might recover their ability to raise funds. So here we are.

Though ICT investments are risky, we want to support them with our decade-lasting professionalism that has been tracing the evolution of proprietary vs. open source in the security and geospatial market.
Discovering how the majority of private and public organisations invested time and money in business models that are weak and keep generating losses prompt us to propose some changes.

Today, our challenge is to support them in generating essentially worth revenues.

Making geospatial and security happen potentially in the most profitable way

Wish us luck!