Integration

JBoss Application Server (and Portal in my case) Shutdown on Fedora and Red Hat

The “$JBOSS_HOME/bin/jboss_init_redhat.sh stop” which sets up the environment and does a “$JBOSS_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh -S” was not working in my environment. After MUCH work, I determined it was because my system is behind a firewall, and the shutdown command was attempting to communicate through it. When I opened ports 1098 and 1099 on the firewall, things got further, but when I watched the packets, I was getting “checksum” errors. Strange.

Anyway, this is the entry which saved me

http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_107_9629.shtm

It explains how to setup the JMX invoker so that it works on localhost. That is what did it for me. Be careful though when using it as there is a missing “” at the end of last example under point 3. I did flag that back to the kbase people so that it might be fixed as of your reading of this.

Please read and heed the references near the end of the kbase article cited above about securing your JBoss server. When you do this, i.e. SecureTheInvokers, you will need to add login parameters after the -S in the shutdown.

There is some indication I may need other ports open on my firewall.
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=UsingJBossBehindAFirewall

We’ll see. Meanwhile, if you are having shutdown problems, which I have seen many posts indicating people have, see the RedHat Kbase post above.

Alfresco Content Management System

While browsing portlets on the JBoss portal site, I found

http://www.alfresco.com

as an open source content management system. I have installed the Community Edition and it looks and feels fine!

I’m still experimenting, but if you are looking for content management, this one looks awefully good.

JBoss Portal 2.4 Install on Fedora Core 5

I recently decided to try JBoss Portal. This is my story, as best I remember it, including some documentation of dead end paths.1. I went to the Red Hat site, clicked JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, clicked JBoss Portal, clicked JBoss Portal download page, and finally Download of JBoss Portal + JBoss AShttp://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jboss/jboss-portal-2.4.0-CR1-bundled.zip?download

Alternatively, I could have gone directly to www.jboss.com, clicked the link for Developers and gone from there.

2. I unzipped the file in my home directory. I found the Quickstart Users Guide in docs/portal/quickstartuser/pdf. I noticed this quote in Chapter 1:

“JBoss Portal is platform independent, but this guide was developed using a windows platform. This guide should work equally well for Unix/Linux installations because JBoss Portal is 100% Pure Java. Obviously, you may need to download the tarball instead of the zipfile and use forward slashes instead of backslashes, etc.”

This sent me on a search for the tarball. I didn’t find it.

3. I started to look around in the directory structure. In bin, I found run.sh and jboss_init_redhat.sh. I looked in jboss_init_redhat.sh. I noticed that it defaulted to a user jboss and the files in a /usr/local/jboss directory. In case it was a convention and following it was important, I created said user with /usr/local/jboss as a home directory. I then logged in as jboss, unzipped the bundle again, and moved the subdirectories directly under /usr/local/jboss with jboss owning everything. There was, thus, /usr/local/jboss/bin, /usr/local/jboss/docs, etc.

4. Knowing from past experience, I set the permissions of the *.sh files in bin to have execute permission for jboss. I used chmod 755 *.sh but 700 works also if you feel protective.

5. I then looked more in jboss_init_redhat.sh. Via examination and trial and error, I discovered I needed to do the following:

a. Set some environmental variables. I put the following lines in /usr/local/jboss/.bashrc:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_12

export JBOSS_CONSOLE=/usr/local/jboss/jboss.log

Go ahead and “touch /usr/local/jboss/jboss.log” as the user jboss so that you’ll be able to read it after root writes it.

b. I made the following changes to jboss_init_redhat.sh

Changed JAVAPTH to /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_12/bin

Changed the “all” in the JBOSSSH to “default”

After this, I was able to run /usr/local/jboss/bin/jboss_init_redhat.sh as root and get things going.

6. Some notes on dead end paths followed:

a. I tried /usr/share/java and /usr/share/java-1.4.2 from the stock Fedora Core install. I would get $Proxy… class not found errors in the log. I then downloaded and installed the RPM from Sun. The init script then worked with the settings specified above.

b. The stock jboss_init_redhat.sh script uses “…run.sh -c all”. That appeared to look for things in /usr/local/jboss/server/all. There was nothing there. I changed “all” to “default” since /usr/local/jboss/server/default was there.

I am now happily going through the examples and tutorials. Let me know if you have any questions.

WebSphere Portal Express 5.0 Install on SUSE Linux 10

Some pointers in case someone is having problems and searching for solutions on the WWW…I had to do “export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5″ to get wsextract.bin for Studio to work. “export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19″ DID NOT work for me.

I had to capitalize the first part of the filenames before the .bin extensions to get wsextract to work.

Studio seemed to work fine after install.

After install, I couldn’t get the test environment to start. In debug, it was looking for xml…. I suspect this is because I did not install everything in the .zips. However, about this time I uninstalled everything and started moving to Portal Enable 5.1 so that I will never know.