Senayan Library System

Today we looked at the Senayan library system. We have been using OpenBiblio in class but the pace of development is practically non-existent. The other alternative is we have been looking at running Koha on USB - more to report on that as we gain some experience.

We downloaded the portable senayan version. It contains it's own xampp stack of apache, php, mysql. To run just extract and copy it to your USB stick and run the apache-start.bat and mysql-start.bat files and then goto http://localhost to see the system. Youl could run this on a hard drive by editing those files so that the path is correct.

This is good - but the students already have an existing xampp installation. The solution is fairly easy:

First we ran the portable version off a USB stick without an existing lamp stack. Next we exported the senyanadb database to a .sql file. This can be done using the mysql command line client, the web-based phpMyadmin or any other client such as Navicat. We used the excellent HeidiSQL client.

The next step was to edit the configuration file which is sysconfig.inc.php
This is found in the apache/htdocs/senayan3-stable12 folder. The lines you want to change are:

define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); <-- Your database host or IP number

define('DB_PORT', '3306'); <-- Your database server port

define('DB_NAME', 'senayandb'); <-- Your database name

define('DB_USERNAME', ' senyanuser '); <-- Your database connection user

define('DB_PASSWORD', ' password_senayanuser '); <-- Your database connection password

NOTE: for an XAMPP setup on a usb stick you have to change the path of the mysql backup utility. Find the section beginning with //* DATABASE BACKUP and for xampplite use:

$sysconf['mysqldump'] = '/xampplite/mysql/bin/mysqldump.exe';

For a quick install we changed the username to root and the password to blank to match the default XAMPP install. Obviously totally insecure and not recommended! The better way would be to create a the above user in mysql with privileges for the senyandb database.

Then we copied the senayan3-stable12 folder to the htdocs directory on the USB Stick.

Next we connected to the mysql database as root and created a new blank database called senayandb and then imported the .sql file from the backup and executed it to build and populate the tables.

When finished we flushed the database and went to http://localhost/senyan3-stable12/index.php and viola - the system appears.

more later...

a student reported that when adding a user the Birth Date field only goes back to 1985! While a date before that can be added manually it does seem odd...she also noted that changes such as adding an author or a book seem to take some time (1-2 minutes) to show up.