configuration

OGC Services don't work outside local network!

A commonly overlooked step in the configuration of an ArcGIS Server is that you need to tell the server what its name is to the outside world. You see, on an internal network your computers might have names. As geologists we prefer names like "Eclogite", "Kyanite", "Harzburgite", etc... However, on the internet computers generally have more complicated names. These names are things like "services.azgs.az.gov" or "www.google.com" or "lab.usgin.org".

By default, your ArcGIS Server knows what the computer's internal name is. However, once you want to share your services with people outside that local network, you need to tell the ArcGIS Server how those other people will find it. You do this by editing a file called "rest.config". If you installed IIS and ArcGIS Server in all the default locations, you'll find this file at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ArcGIS\rest\rest.config.

Look through the file and find all the URLs in it. Make sure that instead of using the computer's internal name, those URLs use the computers external name.

For more information, here are a couple of links:

Django Setup

Introduction

I'm relatively new to Django, and maybe to servers in general, but setting up Django is a chore. Or at least figuring out how to set it up is. There is no installer. You have to have a pretty good understanding of how your HTTP server (IIS, Apache, whatever) works before you're going to be able to get anywhere. Then you'll have to know how to set up quite a few ancillary applications (e.g. Python, WSGI, FastCGI, Flup, MySQL, PostgreSQL). The details of which other applications you want to set up depend entirely on the evironment you're building - so that means it is a little different every time - and that means it is pretty hard to write one single "walkthrough" for how you should do it.

What I want to do here is detail my setup, and along the way make some suggestions about what seems to make things easier. So here goes:

Suggestion: Use Ubuntu (Most recent stable version, always.)

I say this because that apt system really makes installations a breeze. I fumbled for a while to try and setup WSGI (a module for Apache) to work on my Windows machine, to no avail. In Ubuntu it is so easy:

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