IRIS

Intelligent Roadway Information System

Installation

Operating System

Install Fedora onto the server computer. Other operating systems, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, can also be used, but the procedures may vary slightly. This machine should have a minimum of 8 GB of RAM and 400 GB hard drive storage space. The IRIS server does not have a GUI interface, so this computer can be set up headless.

After the operating system is installed, make sure the hostname is configured correctly in DNS. The hostname is needed for some configuration files in the following steps. The following command displays the hostname that can be used to access the server:

hostname -f

Install IRIS

Download and install the IRIS package. This should be a file called iris-{major}.{minor}.{micro}-{build}.noarch.rpm. The {major}, {minor}, and {micro} version numbers and the {build} number can change with each release. It can be installed with the following command (as root):

dnf install iris-{major}.{minor}.{micro}-{build}.noarch.rpm

This will install dependencies not already installed, including OpenJDK, PostgreSQL and nginx.

Initialization

Next, you must initialize the IRIS server installation. Run the following command (as root):

iris_ctl init

This will perform the following steps:

  1. Update the /etc/iris/iris-client.properties file with the server's hostname
  2. Create an SSL key pair for encrypted communication between the server and clients.
  1. Create a symbolic link to the PostgreSQL JDBC driver to make it available to the IRIS server
  2. Create the database cluster and start the PostgreSQL server
  3. Create the tms PostgreSQL user, which IRIS uses to connect to the database
  4. Create the tms database and populate it using a template SQL script
  5. Configure the nginx (web server) and IRIS services to start automatically
  6. Create symbolic links to the current IRIS software version

The command should finish with the following message:

Successfully initialized the IRIS server

Setup GStreamer Autoinstaller

Client workstations require the native GStreamer video framework to play advanced video codecs. While it may be installed manually, doing so requires administrator privileges and setting some environment variables. Alternatively Windows clients can automatically download the required native code from the IRIS server and set up the environment. (Linux clients are still required to install GStreamer via their distribution's pacakage manager.)

To set up the server-side of this process, follow these instructions:

  1. From a Windows computer, download the MinGW 64-bit runtime installer for the latest version of GStreamer here.
  2. Run the installer and perform a "complete" installation, installing all components. You may leave the default installation directory unchanged.
  3. Once the installer is complete, go to the installation directory (C:\gstreamer\1.0\x86_64 by default). Take all the contents of that directory (which should include bin, etc, include, lib, libexec, and share subdirectories) and zip them into a file named: gstreamer-1.0-mingw-x86_64-<version>.zip where <version> is a version number like 1.16.2.
  4. Repeat this process for the 32-bit installer. This time you will zip the contents of C:\gstreamer\1.0\x86 (unless changed from the default) into a file named gstreamer-1.0-mingw-x86-<version>.zip.
  5. Copy both of these files to the IRIS server and put them in /var/www/html/iris-gstreamer/. Make sure the file owner and permissions are suitable (nginx with read-only (444) permissions).
  6. Set gstreamer_version in project.properties to the version of GStreamer you installed (e.g. 1.16.2). After changing this value, you must rebuild and reinstall the IRIS RPM.

Windows clients will now automatically download and unzip these files into their <user_home>/iris/ directory and set the necessary environment variables at runtime when the GStreamer library is needed.

Server Properties

The IRIS server has a configuration file which controls some of its basic settings — /etc/iris/iris-server.properties. Most of the default settings should work, but it may be necessary to make some changes. The file can be modified using a text editor, such as gedit or vim.

Property Description
language ISO 639 alpha-2 or alpha-3 language code. E.g. en
country ISO 3166 alpha-2 country code or UN M.49 numeric-3 area code. E.g., US
variant IETF BCP 47 language variant subtag.
district District name — useful where multiple IRIS servers exist within the same organization
http.proxy List of HTTP proxy settings (used for downloading map tiles, XML files, etc.)
http.proxy.allowlist List of addresses to bypass using proxy server, in CIDR notation (exact IP, or ranges specified such as 192.168.1.0/24)
db.url URL of PostgreSQL server
db.user User for PostgreSQL connection
db.password Password for PostgreSQL connection
sonar.ldap.url URL of LDAP server for user authentication
sonar.port TCP port to connect to SONAR
sonar.protocols Protocol names to enable (regex)
sonar.cipher.suites Cipher suite names to enable (regex)
sonar.session.file File to store client session IDs
keystore.file Location of keystore file
keystore.password Password for accessing keys in keystore.file — automatically generated by the iris_ctl script

Internationalization

There are three properties which control internationalization (i18n). They are language, country and variant. These should only be changed if the IRIS software has been localized for a specific locale.

Database Connection

The db.url, db.user and db.password properties control how the IRIS server connects to the PostgreSQL database. None of these properties should be changed, since they were configured earlier by the iris_ctl script.

LDAP

The sonar.ldap.url property can be used to let IRIS pass user authentication requests to an LDAP server. IRIS can manage user accounts and passwords without an LDAP server, but this feature allows operators to log into IRIS without requiring them to remember an additional user name and password. If your organization already has an LDAP server, such as Active Directory, you should use that.

LDAPS

The URL protocol is normally ldap:, but must be ldaps: for encrypted communication over SSL. To use ldaps, you must first import the SSL certificate into the IRIS keystore. Once you have obtained the SSL certificate for the LDAP server, save it as ldap.cert. Now you can import it with the following command (as root):

keytool -import -alias ldap-cert -keystore /etc/iris/iris-server.keystore -file ldap.cert

Start Services

Finally, the IRIS server can now be started with the following command:

systemctl start iris

Check that everything started OK:

tail /var/log/iris/iris.stderr
systemctl status iris

This should indicate that IRIS is active and running.

Initial Login

From a client computer with Java installed, point your web browser at http://YOUR-SERVER-NAME/iris-client/. From there, you should be able to launch the IRIS client Web Start application and log in.

Enter admin as the username and atms_242 as the password for the initial login. After creating and logging in with a real administrator account, the admin user account should be disabled.

Repository: IRIS