VistA Office EHR 2.3.1 Toaster is available at the WorldVistA project page at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista). A VistA Toaster is an appliance (virtual machine) consisting of VistA, GT.M and Linux that runs under QEMU (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/), which enables the toaster to operate under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. VistA Office EHR 2.3.1 Toaster packages the VistA Office EHR Toaster 2.3.1 software as released on January 31, 2007 (at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vista-officeehr) with GT.M V5.2-000 (as available under GNU General Public License at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm) and Damn Small Linux 3.2 (http://damnsmalllinux.org) installed on a virtual hard drive (flename VistAOfficeEHR_2.3.1.qcow). A CPRS directory is included.
Startup and Shutdown Assuming you have QEMU installed, use "qemu -localtime -redir tcp:2222::22 -redir tcp:9297::9297 VistAOfficeEHR_2.3.1.qcow" to boot the appliance. QEMU boots virtual machines behind a virtual NAT firewall, and the command line forwards port 2222 on the host to port 22 in the virtual machine to provide an ssh connection to the appliance and port 9297 on the host to port 9297 on the virtual machine to allow a direct connect CPRS GUI to connect with VistA. The appliance boots inside a window in your host environment. To shut down, click on the background in the virtual machine (2 clicks may be needed: the first to give the virtual machine focus in your host environment, and the second click going to the virtual machine. Choose "Power Down" and then "Shutdown". Connecting to VistA The normal user in the virtual machine is dsl. The password for both dsl and for root in the appliance is VistA. You should not need root access, but if you do, user dsl is permitted to execute commands with sudo. You can start a shell inside the virtual machine, or you can connect to the appliance via ssh to port 2222 on the host - all Linux distributions come with an ssh client, and I believe Mac OS X does too. putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) is a popular & robust terminal emulator and ssh client for Windows. CPRS can connect to the appliance from the host with "CPRSChart s=localhost p=9297 CCOW=DISABLE". If you start Taskman, retrieving data in the background will work for the CPRS client. The Access and Verify codes are VistAis#1 and #1isVistA respectively. Configuration The appliance is set up to mimic VistA in a non-ASP production environment (i.e., only one production environment on the machine - an ASP environment would share code across environments, with each having separate data). Code and data are under /var/VistAOfficeEHR_2.3.1/. When the system boots, the database is recovered from the journal file, as would be the case in a production environment. So a rundown should never be needed. However, journal files take up space on disk, and you will periodically need to delete old journal files with the command "rm /var/VistADemo20060926/gtm_V5.2-000/g/mumps.mjl_*". Be careful not to delete /var/VistADemo20060926/gtm_V5.2-000/g/mumps.mjl, the active journal file. Other The MD5 checksum of VistAOfficeEHR_2.3.1.zip is 79271abc7ed437d15f8265da7ffc3419. Please verify your download to protect against damages to the file in transit. Please note that this release of VistA Office EHR has not been field tested. Furthermore, most of the components for VOE were introduced to none of the usual VistA SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) where packages and patches of any complexity usually endure a number of iterations between SQA (Software Quality Assurance) reviews, field testing and developer responses. This software is intended for evaluation / demonstration purposes. You take all responsibility for using it. Comments on what works well, and suggestions to improve what doesn't, are always welcome. Thank you, as always, to Nancy Anthracite, for her guidance with VistA, and for providing the demo in a form I could work with. -- Bhaskar