Required Software

Please review the requirements section of the release notes of the version of Metronome you’re installing. The reported version numbers are those used by the UW Metronome (the NMI Lab), but we expect later versions to work as well. Installing and configuring Condor is beyond the scope of this document, although documentation is available. For (other) packages available through your distribution’s package management system, we recommend using it.

Preparing the Database

After installing the database (also outside the scope of this document), you will need to create a database with the same name as DB_NAME (the default name is nmi_history) and install the default schema. Something like the following shell commands should work:

Now as a privileged (database) user, create the DB_WRITER_USER and DB_READER_USER accounts. The former needs insert and update privileges on the whole database; the latter needs only read access, except for the sessions table. If you decide to use the “notes” field in the web interface, you will need to grant write privileges on that column as well. Something like the following statements should work:

Replace ‘@%.example.com@’ with the appropriate domain or host. Only hosts you specify for the DB_WRITER_USER will be able to use the command-line tools, and only hosts you specify for the DB_READER_USER will be able to run the web interface. You may also need to create an additional ‘localhost’ record for each account if the database is running on the same host as the submit node.

Installing Metronome

The Metronome software requires no specific installation; simply untar the release in an appropriate location. (We use /usr/local/nmi-X.Y.Z, and then make symlinks in /nmi; this simplifies version management.)

Configuring Metronome is only a little more complicated. However, the Metronome software will kindly tell you if you’ve missed a setting. (Although it can only tell if a setting is wrong by whether or not it works.) By default, Metronome will look for its configuration file in the following order: in the file named on the command line (—nmiconf); in the NMI_CONF environment variable; in /nmi/etc/nmi.conf; and in the “local” configuration file (.../../etc/nmi.conf, where ... is this directory in which the nmi_* command resides). As a result, you should be able to use Metronome simply calling the commands in bin/. Doing so initially will generally result in a long list of unset configuration items.

The example configuration file shipped with Metronome — the “local” file in etc/nmi.conf — has extensive comments. Uncommented variables must be explicitly set, and may have default values already supplied. Optional variables will be commented with their default values, if any. Because this commentary refers to and is appropriate for the release of Metronome you’ve chosen to install, you should refer to that file for further instructions.