ODS Client Tutorial for ODS by Scott Taggart

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If all doesn't go well... be sure to post a message to the ODS forums here with details of your problem.
For the purposes of this demonstration, we will be running the current ODS Client version as of writing (1.02) on FreeBSD 4.5 (known to work on any BSD and Linux hopefully)

  1. OK, let's start, first of all download the latest version of the ODS Client from the download list on the main site

  2. You will need to unpack the archive that ODS Client is packaged in. Use gunzip then any reasonable version of tar (or for most modern OS's, you can use tar's built-in gunzip feature). We will use tar's built-in gunzip feature for simplicity in this demonstration:

    bash-2.05a$ tar -xzvf odsclient-1.02.tar.gz
    odsclient-1.02/
    odsclient-1.02/Makefile
    odsclient-1.02/README
    odsclient-1.02/vasprintf.c
    odsclient-1.02/client.c
    odsclient-1.02/client.h
    odsclient-1.02/socket.c
    odsclient-1.02/memmem.c

  3. OK, so we've got the client unpacked into a directory called odsclient-1.02, you can rename this directory if you want. Next step is to build the executable binary, instructions of how to do this are in the README file included. Since we are running on FreeBSD, a straight-off "make" will work for us:

    bash-2.05a$ cd odsclient-1.02
    bash-2.05a$ make
    gcc -Wall -O2 -c client.c
    gcc -Wall -O2 -c memmem.c
    gcc -Wall -O2 -c vasprintf.c
    gcc -Wall -O2 -c socket.c
    gcc -Wall -o odsclient client.o memmem.o vasprintf.o socket.o

  4. Everything is ready to go! If you want, you can delete the unnecessary files, the only file you need to keep is odsclient as it's now a compiled binary. Simply run it entering your username, password and your hostname (you can optionally enter your IP address but you are advised to let the server determine it). If you don't know the syntax of entering these details, you can run odsclient on it's own to find out:

    bash-2.05a$ ./odsclient
    usage: ./odsclient username password hostname [ip address]

  5. Enter your details and run it whenever you need... you should be OK from here on