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This month's question: Our K2 servers run on Unix systems, but we use Windows-based desktop systems. We access the command line tools like rcadmin from VT-100-based shell tools, but I'd prefer to use the windows CMD shell. Is it possible to control Unix-based K2 from Windows?

Dr. Search answers: Well, the obvious answer is to use the browser based Dashboard when you can; but if you are a hard core command line person, help is on the way.

First, we will assume your company has licensed the Windows platform of K2 as well as the Unix platform: otherwise you will not have access to the programs at all.

Next, you need to get the command line tools on your desktop. As of K2 5.5 patch 11, Verity doesn't seem to support the ability to install just the command line tools on a system; so you'll have to install full K2 on a Windows server. Then, assuming your desktop is not where you've installed full K2, you'll want to copy the command line tools and DLLs from the K2 Windows server to your system. Because many K2 tools expect a particular directory structure, we suggest you copy the files into a similar structure on your system.

We've used the follow directory structure:

D:\verity\k2
		\_nti\bin
		\common

Put the Windows command line tools and DLLs into the bin directory; and copy the entire COMMON directory from your Unix server onto your system.

Now you need to set up the environment:

• Add the Verity "bin" directory to your path
• Add an environment variable VERITY_CFG and point to verity.cfg in your COMMON directory

Now when you start up Verity command line tools like rcadmin and r2k2, you can use all of the features of the Windows CMD shell - such as up and down arrow to scroll through your entry history - and still control your Unix K2 installation.

One added feature of using Windows tools to control your Unix-based K2 is that auto-login is based on the entry in your COMMON directory, not the system, COMMON; so more than one engineer can use the auto-login capability without having to juggle files. But that's a topic for next month's issue!

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