racingmars/scarletdme repository overview

⁠ScarletDME

ScarletDME is a fork of the last GPL release of the OpenQM multi-value "PICK System"-type database and application development platform. OpenQM is currently a commercial product from Rocket Software⁠, but the original authors, Ladybridge Systems, once released a GPL-licensed version of the Linux version of OpenQM. The last version released under the GPL was 2.6-6. Gene Buckle⁠ and community contributors have done significant work on ScarletDME⁠ to continue improving it and make it 64-bit compatible. This image is based on my own fork of the dev branch of ScarletDME which contains some minor fixes and improvements. The source code for the ScarletDME version used in this image is available on GitHub⁠.

⁠Using this image

For persistent data, create a directory or volume to use for the /qmdata directory inside the container.

This image exposes port 22 for SSH login, 4242 for telnet login, and 4243 for the qmclient interface.

A user named "qmuser" will be created. The password will be randomly generated when you run the container and printed in the container log (e.g. run docker log after starting the container to see the generated password if the container is run in the background), or you may pass the QMUSER_PASSWORD environment variable in to the container to set a password.

For example, to run the container with port 4222 as the SSH port, ports 4242 and 4243 as the qmserver and qmclient ports, and provide persistent data storage, you can start the container with:

$ mkdir qmdata
$ docker run --name scarletdme -d \
   -p 4222:22 -p 4242:4242 -p 4243:4243 \
   -v $(pwd)/qmdata:/qmdata \
   racingmars/scarletdme:latest

If you examine the container logs, you will see the randomly-generated password for the qmuser user:

$ docker logs scarletdme
[...]

*** Generating password for qmuser ***
*** Password is: F6EqFdAhwvPjNMAq ***

[...]

You may then telnet to port 4242 to log in:

$ telnet localhost 4242

[ OpenQM Rev 2.6-6   Copyright Ladybridge Systems, 2007 ]

This program is free software and is supplied with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to modify or redistribute this software subject to certain
conditions.  For details type CONFIG GPL.

Telnet connection from 172.17.0.1
Username: qmuser
Password: ****************

:

Or you may use SSH to log in:

$ ssh -p 4222 qmuser@localhost
[...]
qmuser@localhost's password: 

[ OpenQM Rev 2.6-6   Copyright Ladybridge Systems, 2007 ]

This program is free software and is supplied with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to modify or redistribute this software subject to certain
conditions.  For details type CONFIG GPL.

:

If you're new to all this, know that OFF or QUIT will log you off.

In both cases, you are in the default account, named QMUSER, for the user qmuser.

The QMUSER account is located on disk at /qmdata/qmuser, and the QMSYS account is at /qmdata/qmsys. If you create additional accounts, create them under /qmdata so they are in the persistent data storage volume (e.g. CREATE.ACCOUNT NEWACCT /qmdata/newacct). The SSH host key for the container is also stored in /qmdata/ssh, so it will remain the same across multiple container runs if you use the same volume.

⁠SSH key authentication

If you wish to use SSH keys for authentication, add them to the /qmdata/ssh/keys-qmuser/authorized_keys file after the container is started for the first time. The SSH server is configured to use this location, and a blank file is automatically created with the correct ownership and permission attributes to satisfy sshd's requirements.

⁠Setting the qmuser password

If you wish to specify a password for the qmuser user instead of randomly generating one, use the same run command but with the QMUSER_PASSWORD environment variable set:

$ mkdir qmdata
$ docker run --name scarletdme -d \
   -p 4222:22 -p 4242:4242 -p 4243:4243 \
   -v $(pwd)/qmdata:/qmdata \
   -e QMUSER_PASSWORD=letmein \
   racingmars/scarletdme:latest

⁠Accessing the shell

To access the shell as the qmuser user, run the SH command once you are logged in to ScarletDME in an SSH session (it will not work from a telnet session).

To access the shell as root, use the following Docker command when the container is running (where scarletdme is the container name in the --name argument of original docker run command that started the container):

$ docker exec -it scarletdme bash

⁠Shutting down

The container will cleanly stop ScarletDME and the other running services in response to a docker stop command. You can resume the container with the docker start command and the services will restart and the existing qmuser password will remain set to whatever it was previously.

If you remove the container (docker rm) and run a new container pointing to the existing /qmdata volume, the qmuser user will have a new password, either randomly generated or as set by the QMUSER_PASSWORD environment variable, but all data in the existing QMSYS and QMUSER accounts (and any other accounts you created) will remain.

⁠Additional information

The Rush Flat⁠ web site contains excellent information related to OpenQM, including a two-part series of "Getting Started in OpenQM" books.

You can also find there downloadable HTML help files⁠ and PDF reference documentation⁠.