INSTALLING ON MACOSX

It is possible to install Nebulae in a MacOSX server installation using the same procedure detailed for Solaris and Linux installations. MacOS X contains one of the latest and fastest versions of Sun's Java 2 Virtual Machine, and it is an excellent platform for Nebulae MultiUser Server deployment and testing.

We also have a disk image file for MacOSX available at the download pages at xtras.tabuleiro.com. Double click the file to mount a disk named Nebulae MultiUser Server on the desktop. There are two separate directories: one contains a Nebulae subdiretory, which should be dragged to:

/Applications/Nebulae

This is also the location where the server log file and databases will be created. Before the server is run for the first time the directory also contains the files Nebulae.jar, hsqldb.jar, ScriptMap.cfg, Movie.cfg and Nebulae.cfg. If you have an existing installation, just copy the updated .jar files to it.

The second folder contains optional scripts that can be dragged to /Library/StartupItems/Nebulae. If installed these scripts will start up Nebulae automatically when the system is started. The StartupItems package installation is optional.

Before the server runs for the first time it is recommended that you create at least one administrative user in the server database, to allow access to server administration commands in the future. This can be accomplished by editing the "CreateUser" directive in the Nebulae.cfg file, created in the /Applications/Nebulae folder. Locate the line:

#CreateUser = admin,pass,100

Uncomment the line by removing the pound sign at the beginning, and customize the values for username and password. This command will create a user names "admin", with password "pass" and userlevel 100 the first time the server is started. Please note that while the server can operate without a server administrator account you will not be able to shutdown it remotely until an administrative user is added. You can now reboot your machine and the server will be started automatically by the StartupItem script.

It is also possible to start Nebulae from the a terminal window. This version of the command adds the Nebulae directory to the classpath, so you can put server side script classes in the same directory of Nebulae (/usr/local/nebulae) in order to have them loaded by your movies:

cd /Applications/Nebulae

unlimit

java -cp -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 Nebulae.jar:hsqldb.jar:/Applications/Nebulae net.tabuleiro.nebulae.Nebulae &

For your convenience Nebulae can be restarted or shutdown remotely by an user connected as an administrator (userlevel 100), using the commands "system.server.restart" and "system.server.shutdown". The Nebulae Administrator tool includes these commands and is available at the download section of Tabuleiro web site. It can be used for server administration using any browser with the current Shockwave plugin.

If you need to stop a server you can also open a terminal window and find the server process id from the shell:

ps -auxww

This will show the process IDs for all running applications. Locate the Nebulae server process (it contains the java application name) and kill it with:

kill pidnumber

If you have installed the optional StartupItems package and do not want the server to start automatically in the future just remove the /Libraries/StartupItems/Nebulae directory. To remove the startup scripts you can type the following commands from a terminal window:

cd /Libraries/StartupItems

sudo rm -rf Nebulae

You will be asked for a root password for the system in order to remove the files.