Blazing Moon

Installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

Access

Although you now have a working Koha test bed, your configuration will only let you use Koha from the computer on which it's installed. Let's allow other computers on your network to access it.

Accessing Koha from Other Computers

Setting this up the Right Way involves things beyond the scope of this guide. Following is an easy, albeit inelegant, way to make your new Koha installation accessible to other machines within your network for testing and evaluation purposes.

Don't use this model for a live, production system. For more thoughts on making Koha available to the general public see the next section, Showtime.

Open a terminal and do this:

sudo gedit /etc/koha/koha-httpd.conf

This is the configuration file for the Koha website. You should find two VirtualHost sections. The first one is for the OPAC:

## OPAC
<VirtualHost 127.0.1.1:80>

and the second one is for the administrative interface:

## Intranet
<VirtualHost 127.0.1.1:8080>

These define your Koha websites. The "127.0.1.1" means the sites will only respond when someone requests them as "http://127.0.1.1", in other words, when the web server receives an incoming request for the website at address 127.0.1.1.

Here's the problem with that: an IP address beginning with 127 always refers to the local machine. If someone on a different machine tried to access your Koha server by entering http://127.0.1.1 in their browser's address bar, their browser would try to visit a website on their own machine, not yours.

Someone accessing our new Koha server will need to do it in another way, for example by entering the Koha machine's IP address.

We need to set up the Koha Apache configuration file so that it will accept incoming requests directed at the Koha server's IP address. One way to do this is to tell the Koha websites they should accept requests on port 80 regardless of how they got there, i.e., regardless of what name or IP address the browser used.

First you need to find the local address of your Koha server. Exit from gedit and then at the terminal prompt enter:

ifconfig

The output will include information on a few network adapters (cards): "eth0" is for a wired network card if you have one, "wlan0" for a wireless LAN card, and "lo" is for your localhost/loopback adapter. Either the eth0 card or the wlan0 card should have your machine's local network address; it might look something like "inet addr: 192.168.1.72". Remember that IP address and edit Koha's Apache configuration file:

sudo gedit /etc/koha/koha-httpd.conf

Edit both the OPAC and Intranet VirtualHost entries. For each entry find the "127.0.1.1" and immediate after it enter a space followed by a parallel entry for your local IP address. For example:

## Intranet
<VirtualHost 127.0.1.1:8080 192.168.1.72:8080>

This tells Apache it should accept request not only if the user originally enters http://127.0.1.1, but also if the user enters http://192.168.1.72 (if that happens to be your Koha server's local IP address).

Restart Apache to make the new configuration active:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You should now be able to access Koha from other machines on your intranet. So again, assuming your Koha server's address is 192.168.1.72 (which is almost certainly isn't) the sites' addresses would be:

And importantly, you should still be able to access those sites from the Koha server itself, whether you use the addresses above or the 127.0.1.1 addresses we've used before.