Installing Apache 2.2.11 with Weblogic 10.3 on Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit

This post takes you through the steps to install Apache 2.2.11 on Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit and make it work with Weblogic 10.3. The post walks through the steps that I followed, the problems that I faced and the solutions ( er..hacks) to get them resolved.

Installing Apache

• Is simple do

sudo apt-get install apache2

If you want to build it from sources then follow these steps.

• Once you have installed apache2 then the installation happens at the following locations in Ubuntu

Apache config files are in /etc/apache
Apache log files are in /var/log/apache
Apache libs are in /usr/lib/apache
Other files can be in /usr/share/apache, /var/lib/apache
executables in /usr/sbin apache and apache2ctl

• Now to start apache execute the following

vhazrati@vhazrati-laptop:/usr/sbin$ sudo apache2ctl start

• Note that the server is started as a root, else you might get the following error

(13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

You should be able to access the default page on http://localhost now and see It Works!

Now, Integrating with Weblogic

Solved: Sound Problem on Vostro 1720 with Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit

Recently I installed Ubuntu Jaunty Jacakalope on my Dell Vostro 1720. Everything went fine except the sound. I found this excellent link to make the sound work and now the sound works like a charm.

Enjoy!

Cron and Control-M

In our production environment we had to review and replicate all the CRON jobs running on one of the stacks to the other new stack. Since the stack consists of multiple nodes clustered together running Jboss and another cluster of tomcat nodes, we would have to collect the details from all the servers.

By definition CRON has a single-tier architecture. This means that it is running as a single process on a single machine without any agents or server to communicate with. It also means that each instance of CRON is isolated and a problem in one of the instances on one of the machines would not affect others. This prevents it from becoming a SPOF (Single point of failure) but increases the maintenance and data aggregation overhead. Any changes have to be installed on all the nodes instead of a central machine. Therefore, each scheduler must reside on its own machine and contain its own database. Since there is no integration between the schedulers on the various machines, it is not possible to transfer jobs from one machine to the other, even if one machine has a heavy workload.

To view all the cron jobs on a machine by a user use

• crontab -u exampleuser -l

You can create a cron job from that file as follows:

• crontab /tmp/my_cron_jobs.txt

(Or for exampleuser:

• crontab -u exampleuser /tmp/my_cron_jobs.txt

For more information on creating and editing a cron job refer this and this.

Control-M by BMC software, takes the scheduling and execution of jobs at a higher level of abstraction where in all the jbos can be defined on multiple nodes using a central console. The results would be available on the central dashboard and can be tracked. Alerts are generated from the central location. There is failover support too.

For more differences between Control-M and Cron, refer to this pdf.

Wireless Connection Keeps Dropping on Ubuntu 9.04

If you have been like eagerly installed the latest distribution of Ubuntu which was available a couple of days back then welcome to the party of misbehaving wireless connections.

The Ubuntu version 9.04 was released publically on April 23rd and is called the Jaunty Jackalope. Given the cool features it was a high priority on my update list.

After I updated my wireless connection started dropping at frequent intervals of 5-10 minutes and this was enough to frustrate me. At first I thought it was due to a heavy download that I had initiated but the problem persisted even when i paused the download.

Next step was to explore the Internet to see how many other people were facing the issue. Not many but some. But, none is close to the problem that I am facing.

So this is what I did,

I changed the grub order of menu.lst to load an earlier version of the kernel to see if the problem went away. First, I loaded the

title        Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic version by changing the default boot order to 8

i.e in the menu.lst look at the following section and change the highlighted portion

# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify ’saved’ instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command ’savedefault’.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use ’savedefault’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default        8

Installing Apache HTTP Server on Ubuntu 8.x

Installing Apache HTTP server involves compiling and installing the server. For steps to to compile and install the server follow the instructions.

There could be a scenario where once you execute the command

apachectl -k start

you get something like this

(13)Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

The reason is that the command needs to be executed by the root and for Ubuntu the following command would do the trick

sudo ./apachectl -k start

once done hit the http://localhost/ to see something like It Works!

QuickTip: Solved | Ubuntu 8.10 Firefox Flash Sound Issue

Recently I got an upgrade for my Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and it broke the Firefox Flash sound. My wife was mad at me because now we could not watch the movie that we had decided to watch, so I had to do something real quick.

Here is what solved the problem for me in a matter of 30 minutes, so, not that quick but at least we did watch the movie

Goto Administration –> Synaptic Package Manager –> <Search for flash nonfree>

This should show you the following screen

QuickTip: Changing the Default OS Selection for Ubuntu

On my other laptop I wanted the default selection to be Window$ XP instead of Ubuntu, since my father needs to use it. Changing the default order is a matter of changing one file menu.lst

sudo gedit /boot/menu.lst

Of course you would have to give your password. This would open a file which would look like this

…
## default num
# Set the default entry to the entry number NUM. Numbering starts from 0, and
# the entry number 0 is the default if the command is not used.
#
# You can specify ’saved’ instead of a number. In this case, the default entry
# is the entry saved with the command ’savedefault’.
# WARNING: If you are using dmraid do not use ’savedefault’ or your
# array will desync and will not let you boot your system.
default 0
…….

QuickTip: Working with Microsoft Project (.mpp) files on Ubuntu

Recently I had to work with a Microsoft Project Plan (.mpp) that was sent across by one of our partner vendors for communicating their plan. I hunted a bit for the best way to open and review this mpp file on my Ubuntu 8.04. Then I found OpenProj.

It can import and show mpp files pretty easily and can export them in M$ project 2003 XML format. I have not tried reading the exporting file on a M$ windoze system, but I guess it should be fine.

QuickTip: Ubuntu 8.04: Setting the File Path for Bluetooth Transfers

Press Alt and F2 and enter
gconf-editor

Then navigate to
/apps/gnome-obex-server

QuickTip: Resolving Bluetooth Issues With Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Around a month back I upgraded from 7.10 to 8.04

Most of the stuff worked fine except that my Bluetooth service was broken. I could no longer transfer files from my Nokia 3230 phone to my laptop. The steps defined in my earlier post did not work either and I was always greeted with an “Unable to connect” error. It became terribly irritating after a while and then there had to be a way to get around that.

The way that I suggest is one of the possible many ways, if you find something else please let me know. Read on …