Confidential, for evaluation only.
Marimba Transmitter Admin Tool
Welcome to the transmitter administration page. This transmitter admin
program will help you configure and then start/stop your transmitter.
It is not necessary to launch a transmitter with the help of this
program, but it is recommended that you run this program to configure
your transmitter. Once your transmitter is configured this way, you
can launch it from the command line as follows:
prompt>transmitter transmitter-root-directory
You will specify your transmitter root directory below.
This program will walk you through the steps of creating a directory
for your transmitter, specifying the host and port it will run on,
allow you to specify passwords and hosts which are allowed to publish
channels on your transmitter, as well as a few advanced options for
tuning the performance of your transmitter.
Your transmitter root directory contains everything that a transmitter
needs in order to run properly. This includes configuration files,
transmitter access and channel logs, and of course the channels
themselves. It is necessary that the transmitter has write permission
to this directory so that it can update the channels as they are
changed with the publish program.
The transmitter will perform better if the file system is a local file
system, but that is not a requirement. But, if the file system is a
remote file system and you run the transmitter as root (on UNIX
machines) then you must realize that the transmitter will usually not
have write permission to that remote file system.
When the transmitter directory doesn't exist, you will be asked
whether it's OK to create it. Press the Next button if it's
OK, otherwise press Back to specify a different directory.
The transmitter must be told what host and port will run on. The host
must include the fully qualified domain name, because this is how the
transmitter will be known externally.
On UNIX machines your port must be greater than 1024 unless you run
the transmitter as root.
New versions of channels are stored on a transmitter remotely via the
publish program. Programmers modify channels and once they have
tested them, perform a publish operation to running transmitters with
the updates. Obviously you don't want just anyone changing your
channels, so you can protected this by specifying a password for your
transmitter. If you leave the Password field empty, then no
password will be required to publish channels.
Also, as a second level of protection, you can specify which hosts are
allowed to publish channels. By default channels can only be published
from the host on which the transmitter is running. If you leave the
Hosts listing empty, then all hosts are allowed to publish channels.
Now your transmitter setup is complete with the default configuration.
If you wish to specify some advanced options you can do so by pressing
Advanced. Otherwise you can press Launch to start the
transmitter.
The transmitter consists of an admin process as well as a bunch of
slave transmitter processes. You can specify the number of slave
processes you would like to run at, as well as the minimum and maximum
number of threads you would like each transmitter to run. The number
of processes multiplied by the number of threads is the total number
of connections your transmitter can process at the same time.
The transmitter will server channels from the file system, but as a
performance improvement you can specify that it will keep a cache of
files in memory. If you have enough memory, your best performance
will be accomplished if your memory cache is as big as all the
channels combined. Second best would be as big as your largest
channel. If you can't even deal with that, then well, whatever you
can spare helps.
Your transmitter status is displayed in this page. It should either
be running or stopped. If it's stopped you can see what the exit
status of the transmitter was by keeping your mouse still over the
Stopped message.
You can start and stop the transmitter from this page. Unfortunately
it's not possible to stop the transmitter, go back and reconfigure it,
and then restart it. That, and much, much more will be available in
the next release.