iRing ... what has that to do with Plant Design or Solutions ... well I am not sure, but like every other piece of technology I am not sure of, I tend to embrace it rather than ignore it. I prefer to make my decisions after tearing something apart rather than from a distance, so I thought a quick install would be a start to understanding what iRing is doing ...
Download the iRing Tools ... note that there is a 1.30 but I used 1.21 (31.5MB)
Download implementation Guide ...
Decide to install all on one box ... and then install the Adapter on my OpenPlant P&ID box ...
Upgrade my 2003 Server to SP2 ... (only 120MB ... and 60 minutes of install time)
Windows 2003 SP2 – CHECK
Administrative access to the host server – CHECK
I can login to the GUI on the host server – CHECK – how do I login into the non-GUI on the host server ?
Do I have basic knowledge of Windows and Windows Security – having configured PW and Web parts a few times and Sharepoint a couple of times, I hope I qualify – CHECK
Extract the iRingTools to the iRingWeb folder – CHECK
Internet Access – CHECK
RDS-WIP Access .... – CHECK – wondering if I should put this as a trusted site ... hmm if I have issues I can always update this to trusted but for now let’s leave it as an Internet site.
IIS Installed – CHECK (only the ASP option needed enabling)
.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Installed – CHECK (Another 55 MB)
MIME Extensions registered – CHECK
Install SQL Server 2005 – CHECK (Another 1312 MB later !!! ... and as you will find out ... it did not help ...)
I am now ready to install the first part of iRing
Very simple to enable the web service
Although I did note that I had to reset the machine as the PATH was not set correctly following the SQL installation.
The environment var was set, but typing path in the cmd window did not recognise the new path with ..\90\tools\bin.
Yeehaa .... one iRing Sandbox deployed ...
Oh no ... I need an ids-adi login ... which requires a PCA account ... OK ... time to send an email ...
OK that was painless, thanks to Manoj and Rob DeCarlo.
Now what I did notice which seems to be missing from the steps is that I have to run svcutil.exe to register the server that the iRing services are running on to the client.
Well this does seem to appear to want the .NET SDK (Software Development Kit). A quick rummage around and I find the latest SDK ... 2.6GB yep ... well I did some unchecking of boxes which I thought were unnecessary and I managed to get his down to 260KB (the installer is a fetcher install and is 430 KB) (Uncheck everything but the “Windows Development Tools”)
In reality I guess a client will always be issued with the classes that point to the company’s servers, so an end user would not have this issue, but even if an application developer ships the classes they have to be updated to point to the iRing server.
Creating the Project and Application for the sample dataset .. here I am stuck ... seems to be a disconnect between the SQL Instance and ASP 2.0
Was stuck for a while and I tried a few things ... but a lot of advice seemed to be related to developers rather than end users and I did not want to mess with my configuration too much ...
So in the end I installed SQLEXPRESS re-pointed the files I need to and now I have an iRing installation that is working.
Now I need to point it to an AutoPLANT database and see what it can do ... but that will be much later .. probably Q3 and into the summer ...
What did I learn from all this ...
Well first of all .... it is all built on Microsoft technologies ... of course if I wanted to get really frustrated with error messages then I could have used Oracle. While I am not extolling SQL Server over Oracle, I think you need to use Oracle on a regular basis to make that database sing ... and I have made it sing in the past ... but this was not the moment to do it ...
Second the new web development techniques require some pretty hefty pre-requisites which hopefully will be re-used by other services but in reality I did not have these on this machine and perhaps considering the load in a real environment, I would not run any other services on this machine. I guess these requirements are small fry when compared to the amount of data that could be passed around ... come on ... you must have a 4.5GB database somewhere .... everyone does ... ps anyone else noted that recently the winsxs folder has started to shrink ... oh how I digress ...
The main stumbling block came down to trust ... it would seem the SQL instance would not trust the application ... this was more than logins ... I had the sa login. There was something more fundamental, and I am going to keep touching this subject of trust. iRing will open data to a much wider audience, but in reality I “currently” see it like transport protocol. It is a protocol for communication and in its simplest form will enable two disparate applications to communicate. However, just as those two machines need to authenticate each other before starting communication, so we must discover how we can trust the data that is being broadcast using this protocol. Although, just as FTP and TCP have changed our ability to transfer files, I believe iRing will do the same for data.
Finally, after having iRing installed and, looking at my first mapping (supplied by the iRing installation), I noted that the technology is only a small part of the solution. ISO 15926 / Fiatech et al are providing a stable foundation for our data requirements and they are using a very extensible method for doing this. However, it is still for us as technology providers, data creators, data publishers and data subscribers to ensure our view of the world can be mapped to everyone else’s view of the world. What does that mean? If I have a field called TEST PRESSURE ... what does that mean ? Will this system be tested with AIR, HYDRO, another method ? What are the extents of that value ? Does it apply across a valve, across the whole system, across the whole pipeline ? To a specific user, that value may make perfect sense, when we publish it to the whole community, that value may require additional qualification. These challenges are not meant to be resolved by iRing, but by us the iRing users and community ? Who do you want to publish your data to and will they read it in the right context ? When do you want to publish that data ? When it is complete ? When it is correct ? Hopefully when it is consistent ?
Well that seems to be a title for another blog ...