Connecting to a specified Coda server is easy, thanks to clever scripts provided by the Coda project. After installing a Coda client and server, as explained earlier in this article, log in on the Coda client system and use the su command to become the root user. Next, execute the /usr/sbin/venus-setup script, specifying the host name of the server that you want the client to connect to and the number of disk blocks that you want to devote to the Coda cache on the client. The following example shows the venus-setup script being used to configure a client to connect to the Coda server on the host distfs.vonhagen.org, using a local cache of 40,000 1K blocks (40 MB):

venus-setup distfs.vonhagen.org 20000 
/etc/services already has new services registered! Good.
/etc/services ready for Coda

The venus-setup script modifies the files /etc/services (if necessary) in order to add entries for the network services used by Coda, and modifies the client configuration file /etc/coda/venus.conf to reflect the Coda server name and cache size.

To actually connect to the server, you will need to start (or restart) Coda's cache manager so that it connects to the correct server. You can use the Coda initialization script /etc/rc.d/init.d/venus.init to do this, as in the following example:

etc/rc.d/init.d/venus.init stop
/etc/rc.d/init.d/venus.init start

The first of these terminates any instance of the cache manager that may already be running on the client; the second starts a fresh instance. Your client is now communicating with your Coda server--congratulations, you're running Coda!

Next: Authenticating to Coda »