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In the upcoming release of Greenstone 2, the Greenstone Librarian Interface (GLI) will contain a new feature called The Scheduler. This feature allows the user to schedule periodic (i.e. hourly, daily, weekly) builds of their Greenstone collection while he/she is offline. This will benefit collections that have documents added on an hourly, daily or weekly basis.

This document explains: 1) the configurations and operations you need to perform (or have performed by a system administrator) in order to be able to use the scheduling features of the GLI, and 2) how to use the scheduling feature in the GLI.

There are two files that specify which users do or do not have permission to use cron: cron.allow and cron.deny. Basically, one of the following scenarios applies to you: 1) If your installation of unix/linux maintains a cron.allow file, the username that your GLI installation runs under must be added to cron.allow. This needs to be done by a user with root permission.

2) If your system only maintains a cron.deny file, the username that your GLI installation runs under must not be in cron.deny.

The Windows distribution for Greenstone comes with an open-source cron daemon that must be started before you use the GLI, and should be stopped after you are finished. Also provided are batch files to start and stop the cron daemon.

1) Open a command window.

2) Change to the root directory of your Greenstone installation (%GSDLHOME%) and run setup.bat.

3) Next, change to the directory %GSDLHOME%\bin\windows and run startcron.bat.

If all is successful, the cron daemon that is shipped with Greenstone will start.

To stop the cron daemon, change to the directory %GSDLHOME%\bin\windows and run stopcron.bat.

This is only available in Expert Mode.

Users that can work in Expert mode will have many scheduler features available to them, including: 1) updating an existing collection build, 2) specifying the frequency, and 3) specifying email notification of a build. In addition, the task of scheduling a build is separated from the building of the collection itself - the user can configure the Import and Build Options as many times as desired, before scheduling a build.

In the CREATE Pane, a 'Schedule Options' pane can be accessed to view and set the different options available to the Expert user. At the bottom of this pane is the 'Schedule Action' button, which when clicked, will set up the scheduled build of the collection based using the options selected by the user.