Sim on Server

If I had to describe Sim in a very abstract way I would probably classify it’s components as the following:

1. Parsing modules that take a file and parses it. The parsed results are stored into a database.
2. A Database containing results from all the parsing plus some other standard tables.
3. Django site that takes the tables in the database and displays it.

The goal was to deploy this onto a server. Since the whole interface will eventually be in Django, the first thing that needed to be done was make the server capable of dealing with Django. Internet searches lead me to believe that mod-wsgi was the thing for it.

Now I had to install mod-wsgi on the server. But I couldn’t because I didn’t have the permissions for it. Anyway I tried to install it only for me and not for every user on the server. The hope was that I wouldn’t have needed root access for that. I didn’t knew if that was even possible. But I went ahead with it anyway.

Eventually I came to the realization that there wasn’t any straight or permanent way of doing this (as far as I could tell). I had to install this exclusively or find some alternative. But any alternative would also have required some installations.  So it would have been stupid to run from it. I simply asked the admin for help.

As it turned out, I didn’t need mod-wsgi. I needed to create a virtual environment and then from there I had the power to install everything I need. So I did. Now it was time to bring the database to the server.

After learning how to transfer the database from one machine to the other, I was only a few setting changes away from achieving my goal. And……… I hit another brick wall.

Access and hence my ability to create database (by the name of Sim) was denied. Only after asking the ebullient admin, Amrit (ebullient because he had just repaired his laptop) I came to know that I need to append my user name in front of the database name to be able to create one. So many rules. There must be a guide document for new users on the experimental server to handle such frequently asked questions.