Unit 6 Blog: DSpace Installation

 Overall, I found the installation of DSpace to be relatively painless. I did run into the “HTTP status 404 - /jspui” message when trying to get to the DSpace webpage for the first time, but restarting my server solved that problem.

I also noticed that the first time I changed the site news, the changes went into effect, then I went on the server and changed my site name to IRLS 675 DSpace Repository and the site news was back to the default. I’m wondering if I forgot to hit “Save” the first time I changed the text, though part of me seems to remember completing that step.

I think that I am understanding more of the process and commands than I did when I did my first standard install back in 672. There were still a few sequences of commands that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I was careful not to make any typos so everything worked fine. I embarrassingly did forget that when you use the
“#” symbol in MySql, you’re marking a new line of text and we shouldn’t actually input the # sign, but MySql recognized the problem right away and reminded me to take it out.

Looking at the first set of directions for installing DSpace (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Installing+DSpace+4.2+on+Ubuntu+Server+14.04.1+LTS) I see that they tell you to use GitHub to download the DSpace release. So you need to install “git” to use stuff from the GitHub repository. Overall this install seems pretty similar, though it doesn’t go into the level of detail that ours did. I feel like I could use these instructions to install DSpace successfully.

Looking at the second set of directions (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Installing+DSpace+1.7+on+Ubuntu), these seem extremely similar to what we did in class. I see that they’re using Tomcat 6 instead of 7, but most of the other commands and applications seem the same. These directions are for DSpace 1.7, it doesn’t look like much has changed from DSpace 1.X to 4.x.

The third set of directions (https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSDOC4x/Installing+DSpace) has a “For the Impatioent” section that shows the install in just a few commands for experienced Unix admins. Many of the commands in this section make sense to me, though they are in a different order than we did them in our installs. I would guess that this type of method should only be tried by experienced admins because it’s much more difficult to see where problems are occurring. Since we worked step by step and took a few snapshots, it was easy to troubleshoot and fix the install. I found the long-form install directions for this one a bit more opaque, mostly because there were many more contingencies outlined (PostgreSQL vs. Oracle, for example).

I’m excited to work with DSpace. I see that many academic institutions use DSpace for their repositories, so I feel like its important for me to get some experience with DSpace for my future career.