A lab2lab system requires a control PC with the lab2lab Director software installed (this is often located in an analytical lab). This does not require any special PC hardware: Windows 10 or higher and 8Gb of RAM will suffice as it is not particularly hard disk or processor hungry.
Any PC running any lab2lab software application will need to have the Microsoft .NET Framework version 4.8 or higher installed. This is freely available from Microsoft. Install this before installing Director or Client software on a PC.
To set up Director:
- If a local database is to be used (as opposed to it being hosted on an Oracle install elsewhere on the network) then setting up a PC to host the Director first involves installing Oracle XE 18.4 (SPT Labtech will do this as part of the installation). When the installation wizard is running you will be asked to set the password to be used by three top-level, built-in Oracle accounts. Set this password to “factory”.
- For either a local database or a network install, use the Oracle SQL Plus utility to connect using the built-in SYSTEM account.
- Copy and paste in the entire contents of the schema creation script (latest version of the schema is 20). Once this has completed (it should take only a few seconds) scroll back up the execution sequence to check that there were no error messages. Further details of the database schema are in the 'lab2lab System Administrator's Manual'.
- Then run the Director installer.
- Populate the Config folder with the correct Config.xml, license and .ini files for the new system. These will need to be created by a qualified SPT Labtech employee, with some input from the customer (e.g. for Instrument and method names, and IP addresses). Further details of the lab2lab.ini and Config.xml files are in the 'lab2lab System Administrator's Manual'.
- Start Director.