Big Brother GPS: Server Setup Instructions

Instructions	View log	Send data ...

How to set up the server side for Big Brother GPS.

Test set up

This involves a log file and four scripts:

• positions-test.log
  • Content: log of received data
  • File type: plain text
  • Format: comma-separated values (CSV)
  • Location: somewhere on your server, where the scripts can find it, but preferably outside reach of web browsers.
  • Permissions: readable and writable by the scripts
• bbg_const_test.php: defines some global constants
• bbg_view_test.php: script to view the log file
• bbg_recv_test.php: script to handle a POST and append data to the log file; invoked by phone or send script (next item); not accessed directly by user
• bbg_send_test.php: script to manually test the POST handler; it mimicks what the phone does

Steps:

1. On your web server, find or create a directory accessible by the PHP scripts, but preferably not directly accessible on the web. We call it here the log directory.
2. Copy the example positions-test.log to the log directory, and change its permissions to make it readable and writable for the PHP scripts. This file contains one line of sample data in CSV format.
3. Put the four scripts in a directory that is accessible on the web, and adjust permissions to make them accessible and readable through a web browser.
4. Edit the script bbg_const_test.php to adjust the $logdir variable to point to the log directory on your server. This is an absolute path to that directory, ending in /.
5. Check whether you can view the log file through the script bbg_view_test.php.
6. Check whether you can append data to the log file via the script bbg_send_test.php. This invokes the script bbg_recv_test.php. Check the result via bbg_view_test.php.
7. On your phone, configure BBG's target URL (via Settings > URL) to point to the script bbg_recv_test.php. This URL typically looks like http://www.some.where/.../bbg//bbg_recv_test.php.
8. Set a non-empty value in Secret, so you can recognize in the next step that it really was your phone sending data.
9. On your phone, in BBG, click Update location. This should invoke the script bbg_recv_test.php. Check the result via bbg_view_test.php. In particular, check that the secret data field was logged.
   In case of problems, you can disable filtering in bbg_const_test.php.
10. Optionally, test some other data items that BBG can send. Enable them via BBG's Settings.

If this all works, you are ready to move to the production set up.