Installation and Setup

The Public Kiosk software is available to all current SOS customers at no cost upon request by emailing sos.support@noaa.gov. Instructions will be provided on how to download the software, which is provided as a standard Windows setup.exe program that unpacks and installs the software as well as the default configuration files on the PC. Most of the files reside under C:\shared\sos\kiosk, so the Windows user must have privileges to write to the C: drive. The kiosk software doesn’t use the Windows registry. Approximately 80MB of disk space is required for the software and data files.

Once installed, the hostname or IP address of the SOS machine must be changed in the kiosk_server property for the Kiosk to operate. See the Administration User Interface section for more information. To tell if the Public Kiosk is correctly connected to the SOS machine, look at the colored dot in the lower left corner of the Public User Interface. If it is green, the connection is working correctly, but if it is red, they are not connected and either the settings or the networking must be changed.

The Public Kiosk software may occasionally crash, leaving the Windows PC with the desktop showing. To remedy this situation, you can install an application that will automatically detect that the kiosk is no longer running and restart it automatically. One free application that does this is called Restart On Crash and it has been successfully used with the Public Kiosk. Instructions on how to download and install this utility are described in Appendix D. There are many other Windows restart applications available that may work with the Public Kiosk and NOAA is not specifically endorsing the use of Restart On Crash.