Latest Contributions by BrianWilson

Eric, A friend told me building bicycle wheels was like knitting for him. For me it's coding. Sometimes I write code because it's fun and satisfying and so the "Thought before tools and tools way before coding" does not always apply for me. Also sometimes having EXACTLY the write tool is so satisfying that I just have to build my own. I will look at your picture and notes again after lunch! Brian ... View more

I am not an archeologist, help me out here, when you say 50' grid I am assuming that's a polygon and you subdivide it into small squares? Or that's the size of one square in a big grid? When you say you have GPS points, what do they look like? That is, GPS data wanders around, do you mean you have decimeter or better accuracy for a grid of points? Writing a bit of code to generate a grid is the easy part for me. 🙂 Knowing what you want is the hard part. If you have a picture or reference to a web site that would teach me more please post it and I will help you. ... View more

I once heard someone say when a lawyer says "forever" it means 30 years. ALL software will go away, let's be fair here, the only REAL question is "how long is forever"? "Forever" is shorter in the software world than the lawyer world. I have been going to ESRI conferences long enough to have a sense that when Jack says "Don't worry, we will support X forever" it means you probably have about 6 years. In that 6 years ESRI's job is to make Y so attractive that we all just abandon X and maybe AGP version 2 ????. I keep getting drawn back to ArcMap because I need to get stuff done NOW and not suffer the learning curve and feeling ham handed. While waiting for ArcMap to either load a base map or crash and lose my changes I have time to read GeoNet. Dang. Times up. I wonder if ArcGIS Pro will do this to me? Less often? ... View more

I have general comments for you that I think will really help you. (1) Make the code inside your try-except block(s) as short as possible If you feel you need to put a lot of code into try blocks then use more than one try block! The reason is that it is really hard to see what broke - there is just some problem somewhere in the block Usually it's better to have the script abort because you coded wrong (for example an uninitialized variable) than to have it jump into an except block, hiding the actual problem. (You get a generic ESRI error message instead of a syntax error) In your example for instance I would use a short block at the top fc = "FireIncidents" try:   cur = arcpy.InsertCursor(fc) except Exception as e:   print("Could not get a cursor for %s, error was: %s" % (file, e)) You can use more than one try except block, and don't put code inside blocks that you think is perfect - it's better to have some stupid typo stop your code than to have it hide inside a try-except block.  In my example I put fc = "FireIncidents" outside the block. (2) Catch the actual error message that comes back and show it try:   a = d["my key"] except Exception as e:   print ("I got an exception", e) If you run this you get ('I got an exception', NameError("name 'd' is not defined",)) This is much more useful, now I know I forgot to define my dictionary "d" or I typed its name wrong. And of course you could push the messages into ArcPy with something like this arcpy.AddMessage("I got an exception: %s" % e) ... View more

Murat, I got my nginx proxy working (I am using 10.5.1 though). My question and resolution are here: https://community.esri.com/thread/198112-fix-or-manage-redirects-in-web-adaptor?sr=inbox&ru=3931  I think that you need to fix up your DNS so that it resolves to the internal address within your LAN and to the public IP for outsiders. I use dnsmasq on my networks for this. It's far easier to manage than other DNS servers. For example I have dnsmasq set to resolve names that live on my home network itself but to push those it does not know about out to the outside DNS servers. For example bellman.wildsong.biz resolves for you out there to my Comcast public IP, but internally as 192.168.123.2 but www.wildsong.biz resolves via the outside DNS server to the public ip at my colocated server. Hope this helps -- Brian ... View more

THANKS I knew there was a doc I was not finding. It seems to work now. I set nginx as a reverse proxy with a few additional lines as suggested in the nginx documentation. The config added to nginx now looks like this:     location /arcgis/ {        proxy_pass https://laysan.wildsong.biz/arcgis/;        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host:$server_port;        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;     } See https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/likeapache/ Then I set properties on Portal to look like this:  {"WebContextURL":"https://bellman.wildsong.biz/arcgis"} It's no longer sending me off to the internal address. On the first load it gave an error which I have seen a couple times before where the contents of the screen where the login/password form comes up instead contains and error message about a redirect uri. I reloaded the page and it has worked since. ... View more

I refuse to believe it's the names, no programmer would ever do that to me. 🙂 I've already thought of making the names less generic though, and since I want to be able to spin up multiple instances to test load balancing and HA I should probably add suffixes... server1, server2, portal1, portal2 etc... that comes later though. ... View more

This is not really about getting things going at my own site it's about getting a docker set up designed that works for anyone. If I set the "hostname" on the Dockers to "portal.arcgis.net" and "web-adaptor.arcgis.net" instead of just the names "portal" and "web-adaptor" AND I create an entry in DNS that matches the Docker bridge network then I can get it to work. This is just a hack since it requires looking up internal network IP addresses and putting them in my LAN DNS (outside of docker) I am still learning about the wrinkles of Docker networking and DNS resolution. There is a "hostname" option when you start docker and there is also a "network-alias" option. If I use "network-alias" the hostname is not change but docker machines can see each other with those names. For example, I can set the portal container to have the alias "portal" and then all the other containers can see it as "portal" without any other config.. except for ESRI.. for example I can use curl from web-adaptor and it can reach both "https://portal:7443" and "https://portal.arcgise.net:7443/" but apparently Portal and WebAdaptor refuse to use Docker's internal resolver and jump out to the outside DNS I specify for resolving names outside. If I specify a simple name for hostname like "portal" (which is normal) then the ESRI software will go all the way through the config set up and then when it launches it REALLY REALLY wants to see a complete domain name and fails. EVENTUALLY I will get it sorted, for now I am working around it by making the hostnames have a full domain name in them. This has the ugly side effect it turns out of making Web Adaptor fail when it's behind a reverse proxy, something new to sort out. But next I have to get PostgreSQL working as the database so all this naming stuff is on the back burner for a day or two. ... View more

Dear ESRI -- It's 2017 now, and two years have gone by since this problem was reported, and containerization is now a common practice. The problem still exists in 10.5.1; you still need to fix this. Containers and headless servers don't have "remote desktops". It's possible to install desktop software on a Linux server but not desirable. With containers, (like Docker) it is really not practical. I am currently battling with the configurewebadaptor.sh script, it would be nice to have a functional web interface to fall back on if I cannot get that to work. Thanks--Brian ... View more

I have combined the 4 separate repositories into one, I am at the point where I want to start composing the separate dockers so that they work together. They are now in https://github.com/Geo-CEG/docker-arcgis-enterprise. The old separate repos now just direct you to the new one. I wrote a python script that uses the REST API to do the initial site configuration for ArcGIS Server, so now it comes up pretty much automatically. Today I add a similar script to the Portal container. It's just about working. Once that's done I can finish the bit that registers the Web Adaptor to Portal. I am also setting up SQL Server as the back end datastore, using this Docker container from Microsoft that runs SQL Server 2017 in an Ubuntu Linux container. SQL Server running on Linux. Who ever would have thought that would happen? ... View more

I am currently working on a Docker solution. I started with 10.5, now am working with 10.5.1. I have ArcGIS Server, Portal For Server, Web Adaptor, and ArcGIS Datastore running now in Docker containers. I am working on the myriad details but things are already limping along. I have to do a little hand waving (like what you see in conference live demos 🙂 but I can get them all spun up and hooked together. All software is installed, licensed, and configured automatically. More or less. I know that it can be done and am trying to get everything going before worrying about polishing each part. You can see the work on github, look here: geo-ceg/docker-  You will see some incomplete open source dockers for things like geoserver and geogig there. Ignore those for now! The ones I am working on are docker-arcgis-server, docker-portal-for-arcgis, docker-web-adaptor, and docker-arcgis-datastore. Once I am done I will be able to mix and match - run everything on a laptop for portable testing, or spread dockers out over multiple machines for load balancing. Or test clustering out by spinning up multiple AGS containers... I have been ignoring rather big issues until I have the entire suite running. For example, usernames/passwords and hostnames. I am learning minutiae of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.5.1 and Docker while I do this. I see how to do it now so I am not worried about it. (Persisting data is a huge problem, read on for more on that.) ArcGIS Enterprise is an onion, you knew that already if you have tried to install it! I keep peeling off another layer saying "once this layer is done, I will write a splendid blog posting to tell everyone about it"... then I discover another required layer inside... currently I am trying to set up Datastore with an RDBMS so that I can connect it to a Site and then create a Hosted Server and then connect that to Portal... I think I said that correctly. Microsoft provides SQL Server in a Docker, I plan on trying that as the RDBMS. Sometimes I read and attempt to follow ESRI docs only to try something and discover some things are fundamentally wrong. For example, they say Web Adaptor is an optional accessory, (maybe it was in earlier releases?) but when I try to use a reverse proxy instead, Portal firmly says "WHERE IS YOUR WEB ADAPTOR? I NEED ONE."  So -- I added the Web Adaptor layer. Maybe somehow there is a workaround but creating the Docker for it was pretty straightforward... once I learned how to automate creation and installation of self-signed certificates for Tomcat. And also that Tomcat HAS TO RUN on ports 80/443 - the installer scripts die if you don't set it up that way. And that required learning about authbind, such fun! The stickiest part right now is that every time I spin up an ArcGIS Server container, I have to create a new site. Per the documentation,  I can persist the files in config-store/ and directories/ but it matters not! When I start a container the best I can get is "I see those files you persisted and you must delete them or I won't start!". Such petulant software! I thought I would try using the official backup/restore scripts. I made a backup, spun up a new container, tried to do a restore and it said "I can't do a restore until you create a site." To me, this says ESRI has a very whimsical notion of "backup" and "restore".  ANYWAY I will continue pushing my changes up to github and these dockers will get stronger and stronger. So far, so good. It's a roller coaster ride! Whee! ... View more

ArcGIS Server 10.5 appears to be saving state somewhere outside of "config-store" and "directories". I have set up those directories to be persistent, so they are saved across restarts. That means that every time I start a docker instance, it should come up with the same site. It does not. So I am thinking there is another file or folder outside config-store that is used to persist settings. Do you know what it is? Otherwise I have ArcGIS Server 10.5 working fine in Docker, I have published the work so far at http://github.com/geo-ceg/docker-arcgis-server Brian Wilson, GISP ... View more