I wonder about the merits of a stripping out the metadata maintenance
modules in a such a lite-lite install? Not sure how crippling this
would be. Metadata import being the only way to update metadata.
Maybe that’s too draconian but it could work for ultra-offline data
entry.
I would recommend being quite draconian and pretty much disable the whole
Maintenance menu and quite a bit of the services menu as well. And then
train them really well on the remaining parts, and creating a targeted,
short and simple manual (ideally accompanied by some video clips) so that
support can be kept to a minimum (or at worst done over the phone).
And I thought I was the draconian one 
Still if its only a matter
of removing some modules from a custom pom it could be worth looking
at. Olav maybe you want to try and see how it looks.
This is very easy to do, and should even make the application more lightweight for weaker hardware (do you know anything about the HW, Olav?), but must of course be thought through and tested so that vital functionality is not left out - and also not possible to “restore” (by changing user access rights).
The emphasis on eliminating moving parts and sources of error of course also
harks back to you “DHIS appliance” idea, Bob. One could even think of
running DHIS Live with H2 off USB sticks (though they are flimsy), which
could even be made to boot up something like DamnedSmallLinux.
I’m not too convinced by the usb stick idea. Not that its not doable.
And I think its probably great for demos (WHO-on-a-stick) but in
real-life I don’t think these sticks are well suited for database
read-writes.
I do agree with this, and not really recommending it - should perhaps even not have mentioned it as a possibility. The great advantage of Linux (probably installed on a hard drive) is that it’s less prone to virii (usually propagated by USB sticks in such an unconnected environment). If that is not feasible, perhaps the machines should dual boot: A stripped down Linux partition for DHIS2, Windows for everything else they are doing (mostly Word and Excel, perhaps?)
One of the issues people do tend to have with h2 is a lack of
supporting tools to diagnose when things go wrong. And I’d hate to be
on the phone to someone stepping through openoffice+jdbc setup or the
like. If I were to ship h2 into the darkness of many remote districts
I think I would write a couple of really simple and small diagnostic
tools to test the integrity and health of the database and ship that
too. Just the “where there is no doctor” common sorts of faults.
Then when I get the call “help! my dhis2-ultra-lite doesn’t work”,
I’d ask them to run the diagnostic tool and read out the diagnosis
over the phone to quickly figure out if the h2 file is corrupted, or
metadata is misconfigured or what have you. Planning for 170 offline
installs (or some reasonable proportion of that number) is no picnic.
The more work up front to make those calls easier the better.
Indeed - the lack of tool support counts against H2 - though the tools available for Postgres may also require extensive training to be used by anyone. So I agree very much with any kind of super simple administrative support that could be made readily available - no matter the choice of db.
Knut
···
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Bob Jolliffe bobjolliffe@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 August 2011 16:14, Knut Staring knutst@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:25 PM, Bob Jolliffe bobjolliffe@gmail.com wrote:
On 18 August 2011 14:40, Olav Poppe olav.poppe@gmail.com wrote:
Cheers
Bob
Knut
Bob
Olav
Den 18. aug. 2011 kl. 13:32 skrev Jason Pickering:
I agree with both Bob and Ola.
We have tried not quite yet succeeded in getting DHIS2 installed with
Tomcat/Postgres on Windows with a one-click installer, this my caveat
about
a “supervised” install. There are a lot of things which can happen on
users
machines and maintenance becomes a huge issue. DHIS is still under
intense
development, and a lot of things change quickly. Upgrading a single
server
is a piece of cake. Upgrading dozens or hundreds of off-line machines is
a
true nightmare and a serious risk and resource drain to any deployment.
I agree with Ola. Totally exclude an on-line server as an option first.
If
you have already done that, all I can say is, be prepared for a LOT of
tech
support.
Regards,
Jason
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:15 PM, Ola Hodne Titlestad olati@ifi.uio.no > > >> > wrote:
Olav,
How offline are these districts? Can they not get connected through
mobile
usb modems/dongles? There is so much to gain from online deployment
that I
would check out every alternative of connectivity before deciding to go
completely offline. The mobile Internet solution is working very well
in
Kenya. With the offline data entry capabilities in the upcoming 2.4,
the
districts do not have to be online during the data entry process, which
is a
major advantage in areas with poor/unstable connectivity.
Further recommendations on deployment can be found in the
implementation
guide here:
http://dhis2.org/doc/snapshot/en/implementer/html/ch04.html
And a presentation on the same topic in the zip file with
implementation
guide slides here:
http://dhis2.org/download/presentations/presentations.zip
Ola
Ola Hodne Titlestad (Mr)
HISP
Department of Informatics
University of Oslo
Mobile: +47 48069736
Home address: Vetlandsvn. 95B, 0685 Oslo, Norway. Googlemaps link
On 18 August 2011 15:02, Jason Pickering jason.p.pickering@gmail.com > > >> >> wrote:
One strong reason not to use it is the relative lack of testing. In
theory, it should work, but just as with MySQL, much more testing has
occurred with Postgres than with the other database systems.
We have some beta-level Windows installers, which might be of interest
to
you, which work pretty well under supervised circumstances. It might
be
something to consider if you want a relatively automated install of
the
DHISLive/Postgresql stack, with automated restore of the database.
Regards,
Jason
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Olav Poppe olav.poppe@gmail.com > > >> >>> wrote:
Hello,
we’re looking at what do to with offline installations for the
implementation here in Ghana. Are there any reasons not to use DHIS
Live?
Can H2 be used (importing the metadata into an empty database), or
should
postgres be set up as well?
There are 170 districts here, and about half of them might have to be
offline installs so an easy-to-use solutions would be good.
Thanks,
Olav
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–
Cheers,
Knut Staring
–
Cheers,
Knut Staring