User Support Forum

I've not put much effort into this yet, but I thought I would just ask the question as it could benefit the users on the list anyway, and in searching didn't see this discussed.

One of the church's that I consult is having a member build them a server. The operating system the member chose is a popular Linux flavor. It got me to thinking, is it required to install via the setup on the CD for the server? Can it be installed and have the initial run on a Windows client then moved to the Samba share? On most of the computers at our own church, we run Netsetup on each of the clients, but it seems like the server files could reside in a Samba share. And what about installing Powerchurch upgrades? I'm thinking the install would most likely need to be moved back to a Windows station so the CD installer could be run and the upgrade take place.

What other things could prevent this from working? Personally I'm for a Windows solution here, but I do like to use free and reputable open source applications when I can.

All you really need to do is set up a Samba share on the server and map to it from a workstation (just like you would for a regular PowerChurch network setup). Make sure the permissions are set to allow read and write access to everyone.

The difference is, instead of installing directly on the sever, you'd install from the workstation to the mapped drive. So, you'd change the C:\PowerChurch default path during the install to P:\ or whatever letter you give your mapped drive.

This places all the files to be shared on the sever, and does the equivalent of running netsetup on that particular workstation, so you've effectively killed two birds with one stone. You can then map that drive on the other workstations, run netsetup, and you're done.

Updates are equally simple - you run the webmr file on a workstation, and point it to the mapped drive.

Upgrading to a new version is the most complicated thing, but it's not hard either. You install the new version in the same manner as the original, then on first run from the workstation, you have the option to start with blank data files or convert existing data. You choose to convert, then point the conversion to the mapped drive where the old version is sitting. The only hitch with this is you are copying the data from the server, converting it locally, then putting it back to the sever in the new installation. Since you're making two trips to the sever, it's likely that the conversion will be a little slower than it would be if everything resided locally. That's usually not a big deal though.

This is exactly how I installed P9 to a NT server running MS BackOffice. The maintenance upgrade was a snap too.

The only updates available are always called pcp10mr.exe. Of course the number varies to the version number. Where do we get the WebMR file?

The PCP10MR.EXE is the Web Maintenance Release. He was just using the old term that we used when there was a difference in the maintenace release that was downloaded from the website.