Confidential, for evaluation only.

Marimba Transmitter Admin Tool

Introduction

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.


Transmitter Root Directory

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.


Create New Transmitter Directory

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.


Transmitter Host and Port

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.


Transmitter Access

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.


Transmitter Setup Complete

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.


Transmitter Concurrency

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.


Transmitter Cache

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.


Transmitter Status

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.