Open a database through BiblioRemote server

BiblioRemote is installed with Biblioscape under the folder "...\BiblioRemote\". With BiblioRemote, you can open a Biblioscape database that resides on a remote machine that has the BiblioRemote server running. The remote machine could be on your LAN or a machine in another city, country, even continent. By default, the BiblioRemote server supports 3 concurrent sessions for personal use for free. If your organization needs to support more users, please order more licenses at our web site.

To have BiblioRemote access set up correctly, you need to have a PC designated as server which must have a permanent IP address. If you want users outside your firewall to open database through BiblioRemote, you must open the ports used by BiblioRemote. The client PC must have Biblioscape installed and have Internet or Intranet access. The server PC doesn't need to have Biblioscape installed. However, we recommend you do so, because some activities such as database maintenance and record importation are much quicker to perform on the server PC locally. If your server doesn't have Biblioscape installed, please copy the directory "BiblioRemote" under your Biblioscape root directory to the server PC.

To configure the BiblioRemote server from the server PC:

  1. On the server PC, run "dbsrvr.exe" under the BiblioRemote directory. You can also run BiblioRemote as a Windows service.
  2. On the server PC, run "srvadmin.exe" under the BiblioRemote directory, and go to "File | Options...".
  3. On the "Default" tab, select "Local Area Network" as the "Remote Type". Enter the host name or IP address of the server PC in the appropriate fields, and click the "OK" button to close the window.
  4. In srvadmin, go to "File | Login to Server". Enter "Admin" as User Name and "DBAdmin" as Password to login. This is the default password; please change it after first login for security reasons. If you cannot login, please make sure the two ports used by BiblioRemote server port 12005 and 12006 are not blocked by Windows firewall. These two ports are blocked by default in Windows Vista. Click here to learn how to open a blocked port.
  5. After login to the server, go to the "Users" tab. You should change the password for the Admin account instead of keeping the default password. Please keep your user password in a secure place. Then click the "Add" button to add a new user. You can also continue to use the Admin account if you wish. If you need to support more than one BiblioRemote user, you should use srvadmin to create an account on the BiblioRemote server for each user.

  6. Next, go to the "Database" tab. Before doing so, you need to ensure that there is a Biblioscape database on the server for the remote Biblioscape client to open. You can transfer Biblioscape databases by using WinZip (http://www.winzip.com) to compress all files in the Biblioscape database directory into a zip file. Transfer the zip file to the server PC and unzip it. Once you have done this, in srvradmin's "Database" tab click the "Add" button. First, give the database a name. You will need this name on the client PC to configure the setup; it can be anything you like (in other words, it doesn't have to have the same name as the *.bsl file in the database, although it's recommended that it does, for clarity). Click the "Select" button to point to the folder where the database files resides. Then click the "Save" button. Create one database name for each *.bsl file. In the next step, you can assign multiple users to a single database created in this step.

  7. Then, go to the "Database Users" tab. Select the database from the combo box first. Then click "Add" button to add users to this database. Make sure users are given the rights they need, for example to Read, Insert, Update, Delete. Click the Save button to save the changes. Now you can logout from the server by going to "File | Logout from Server".

  8. On the client PC, start Biblioscape and go to the menu command "File | Database | Configure Remote Database...".
  9. Click the "New" button, select a directory and give a file name for the configuration file ("*.bsr").
  10. Now you need to fill out the configuration settings. Enter the IP address of the server machine with dbsrvr.exe running on it. Enter the remote database name you created in step 6. For the "Remote Type", select "LAN" if the server PC is on the same Local Area Network as the client PC. If the server PC is in another building, city, or country, please select "Internet". Enter the user name you created in step 5 or use the default Admin account. Enter the password for the account you entered. In the *.bsr file that will be created when you save the configuration, the password will be encrypted. If you do this, other people will not need the password to open the *.bsr file with Biblioscape to open the remote database. To be more secure, you can leave the Password field blank. However, the downside of doing this is that each time you open the remote database, you will have to enter the password manually, which can be annoying. If you have the password field filled in the *.bsr file, the remote database will be opened automatically when you open the *.bsr file. Click the "Save" button to save the configuration file.

  11. In Biblioscape, go to "File | Database | Open Database". Select the *.bsr file you created in step 8 and open it. The remote database should then be opened.

Note: This section is for advanced users who want to use host name instead of IP address, and service name instead of port number. In some cases when the sever IP address and port number keep changing, it is more convenient to use host name instead of IP address, and service name instead of port number. The mapping between host name and IP address is controlled by the Hosts text file available from the client operating system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file). You can add an entry to this file. It will allow you to refer to the server by host name instead of IP address. For example:

192.168.0.100          BiblioRemoteServer

When your remote machine IP changes, you can just update the hosts file instead of the *.bsr files. The mapping between service name and port number is also controlled by the Services text file available from the client operating system (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832017). You can add an entry to allow you to refer to the server by service name instead of port number. For example:

BiblioRemoteData             12005/tcp
BiblioRemoteAdmin           12006/tcp

Once you have added entried to those two mapping files, you can edit your *.bsr file. Open Biblioscape *.bsr file with a plain text editor like notePad. Add entry "RemoteHost" or "RemoteService" to the *.bsr file. You can leave the RemoteIP and RemotePort entries untouched. Because RemoteHost takes precedence over RemoteIP, RemoteService takes precedence over RemotePort. For example:

[RemoteDB]
RemoteIP=192.168.0.100
RemoteHost=BiblioRemoteServer
RemotePort=12005
RemoteService=BiblioRemoteData
RemoteUser=smithon
RemotePassword=ž‘˜š“
RemoteDatabase=sample
RemoteType=LAN

Close and save changes to the *.bsr file. The next time you open the *.brs file from Biblioscape, RemoteHost setting will be used instead of RemoteIP setting, and RemoteService setting will be used instead of RemotePort setting.

Note: With BiblioRemote, a research group can share a common Biblioscape database from different locations. A researcher can have the BiblioRemote server running in his or her office and open the same database from a home PC if he or she has broadband access at home (dialup access will probably be too slow to be practical; it's normally better to use BiblioWeb in this situation). In a multi-user environment in which BiblioRemote is not the server, when the database become large, sharing a common database on the file server can be slow because Biblioscape needs to download all records through the network in order to perform queries, etc. With BiblioRemote installed on the server, the performance can be much improved because the processing is done at the server and only the relevant records are downloaded to the client PC. So, even on the same LAN, client/server setup with BiblioRemote can improve the performance when the database is large.