[AG-TECH] Invisible Rat (AG2.3, RedHat 9 Linux)

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Andrew,

With the FC1 AccessGrid-2.3-5.i386.rpm and AccessGrid-2.3-6.i386.rpm, I 
forgot to increase the version number in
AudioService.svc (located in AudioService.zip), if it's not increased, then 
the contents of the following
folder don't get replaced with a newer version of rat:
   ~/.AccessGrid/local_services/AudioService

[I did remeber to increase the version number with the FC2 AudioService.zip]

So, you could do the following (but make sure AGServiceManager.py is not
running) :
   rm -rf ~/.AccessGrid/local_services/AudioService

Restart the ServiceManager and a new AudioService will get unpacked the 
first time AudioService is used.

The rat that comes with AccessGrid-2.3-5 and later was rebuilt with 
gcc-2.9.6 (instead of gcc 3.x), which seemed to fix the problem of the rat 
GUI not coming up in some situations. Also rat now has alsa lib statically 
linked, so I could remove the alsa-lib RPM dependency.

Recently Steve Smith cleaned up and fixed some of the rat souce code (see 
"Big Linux fixup patch" thread in ag-tech mailing list). I've rebuilt rat 
with Steve's patches, if you want to try it, download:
  http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~agn/ag_fedora/FC1/stable/patches/AudioService.zip
to replace:
  /etc/AccessGrid/NodeServices/AudioService.zip

It should automatically get unpacked as I've increased the version number in 
AudioService.svc.

> I put AG 2.3 (from the UQ FC1 rpms) on a desktop running RedHat 9. When
> Rat runs, the UI never appears, though the ui and media tasks seem to be
> running OK. I tried both the AG2.3 and AG2.2 Rat (on other machines I've
> had problems with the Alsa patched Rat; one one alsaconfig says "no
> cards" but OSS runs fine...), and along the way I found that if iptables
> stops Rat talking to 224.something it hangs until it can. But this is a
> different problem - the Rat from VRVS works OK. In fact, I've packaged
> that one into AudioService.zip and it works, but I'd like to solve the
> problem as the interface is slightly different - handling of spaces in
> venue names, codec support etc.


Cheers,
Doug