Started a fresh install around 1-2 AM last night. Thanks to minimal amounts of sleep and copious amounts of caffeine, the completed mod_tile, renderd, mapnik, and OpenLayers can be seen here:
http://shippb-1.stu.rpi.edu/openlayers/html/map.html
It may be slow due to the limitations of the server.
Full documentation will be forthcoming.
So after being able to have a map of the UK work with mod_tile (anything larger than that doesn’t finish getting read into the database with 512MB of RAM), the server decided to not let me run the renderd daemon. Or anything else for that matter. Reboot?
Yeah, it killed itself…again. I think it might be an actual hardware failure, it failed to boot with a clean linux install tonight, had to reinstall it again for it to boot properly.
So that problem that wouldn’t let me log in anywhere apparently also won’t let me mount anything but the boot manager in a live CD. Currently reinstalling 10.04, starting over.
On the plus side, I’ll know what I’m doing this time and not have to follow broken documentation.
It’s going to be a long night.
Before I start, a quick apology for not updating more, college hasn’t exactly been giving me a lot of free time.
Anyways, the map server (shippb-1.stu.rpi.edu) has mod_tile working! After going through several documents, none of which were complete in any sense of the word, it works. Although the server won’t accept any sort of login, either local or ssh, at the moment.
I rolled the server back this past weekend to Ubuntu 10.04 from 10.10 for a few reasons. Mainly there was an incredible amount of lag on ssh terminals, even from my desktop right next to the machine using my own router o.O It also made sense to change the OS back to the long term support version. Directories and such were different too, making it harder to figure out what was going on.
Documentation for mod_tile and mapnik working together should be up sometime within the next few weeks, I just need to rewrite stuff from my notes and get the slippy map deployed.
Back to trying to figure out what happened to the server. And making coffee, lots of coffee.
Caffeine = Server Progress.
So the documentation for the Jumpstart International server setup is finished. It is currently available here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/544542/Full%20Jumpstart%20Guide.txt
Please note, this is the version that uses Tilecache. Thanks to notes provided by Jeff Haack, mod_tile will be implemented soon and replace Tilecache for serving mapnik tiles. My apologies for the slow progress, our server crashed beyond recovery during the move from Ryan’s apartment to my dorm and had to be rebuilt. I intend on having the first revision with mod_tile instructions finished within the next 2 weeks and will upload it here.
…but here’s an update on the project.
Since the previous post, a lot has happened. We have done enough work on the virtual machine to feel confident about moving onto a physical server. The virtual machine has working copies of the mapnik library, mapnik tools (mapnik distributed in OSM’s SVN repo), Tilecache, and Rails Port.
Tilecache
We have now moved off a virtual machine onto a server provided by Moorthy that is currently running in my apartment. You can reach it by going to rbmaps.ath.cx, but you won’t find much there at the moment.
The OSM server is well on it’s way while following this tutorial. I would estimate it’s around 90% there.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a smooth journey (the road had some bumps and potholes in it). The main setback is that OSM data are large pieces of data and require considerable amounts of time to process. A single country took around 6 hours to process and it didn’t even finish; the process ran out of memory after 6 hours. 
Oops.
The server has been reconfigured to give it more swap space so this shouldn’t happen again. I will be trying again today and the OSM Tile Server should be up by tonight, hopefully this time it will be a smoother ride.
