gregs

I recently had to re-build my VPS and with the help of the documents over Linode’s Library I was up and running again within a couple of hours. A great concise, informative and accurate resource for configuring Linux based servers. Thanks again to the folks at Linode!

Debian specific, but if you need to edit jvm configuration details for Jetty, look for this file:

And locate the lines below to start fine tuning Jetty's memory usage:

I new it was possible, just never took the time to look it up.

As with all types of deletes, recursive or not, use with caution.

Short and sweet, step by step guide for creating a grails war and deploying it to your Jetty server (includes apache2 proxy steps)

1. grails war (your app), in this case epic.war
2. Copy to server
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   1. scp epic.war user@server:/location

3. On Debian the location for jetty webapps is: /var/lib/jetty/webapps
4. Copy from upload location to the above folder (I used sudo)
5. Change permissions:
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   1. sudo chown jetty:adm epic-0-0.1.war

6. created a *.xml context file in /etc/jetty/contexts, with something like this [note case is important!!]:
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   1. <?xml version="1.0"  encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   2. <!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN" "http://jetty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd">
   3. <Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
   4.   <Set name="contextPath">/epic</Set>
   5.   <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps/epic-0-0.1.war</Set>
   6. </Configure>

7. restart jetty :
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   1. sudo /etc/init.d/jetty restart

   (try stop/start as well)

8. test with :
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   1. lynx http://localhost:8080/epic/

9. Nice but I'd like http://localhost/epic/ so enable mod_proxy in apache if you haven't already :
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   1. a2enmod proxy

10. edit /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.load and if not present add at end:
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    1. LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so

11. edit your virtualhost conf file I am using 000-default and add:
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    1. ProxyRequests Off
    2. <Proxy *>
    3.     Order deny,allow
    4.      Allow from all
    5. </Proxy>
    6. ProxyPass        /epic http://localhost:8080/epic
    7. ProxyPassReverse /epic http://localhost:8080/epic
    8. ProxyPreserveHost On

12. restart apache : 
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    1. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

13. now you can
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    1. lynx http://localhost/epic/

Update: I had omitted the ProxyPreserveHost On from the Apache configuration, which resulted in css, images and external javascripts not loading. It also caused an issue with accessing controllers.

Sources:

• Configuring mod_proxy
• Deploying a web application to Jetty

More for posterity, this was the last step that was eluding me. I had found numerous resources to get me started on the path to setting up Apache and SSL, but when it came to having a working config and server, when I went to browse my Debian test server, I would get this message:

When you google for the solution I found a number of dead ends, but in the comments for one of them there was a helpful pointer.

When you do an 'ls -la' on sites-enabled (inside /etc/apache2), you will see a symbolic link to the sites-available folder and typically just for the default site (000-default -> default). However in sites-available there's also a default-ssl config file. Creating a symbolic link to this file and reloading apache fixed my problem and now I have apache serving up http over SSL .

It's been while since I attended to my VPS, I decided to spend some time last night upgrading my distribution from Etch to Lenny. This is normally a moment where your heart sinks as quite a few things do tend to go belly up, but I am happy to report that I only came across some minor issues and these were resolved in minutes as opposed to hours.

1. MySQL : failed to start, complaining about:
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   1. /etc/init.d/mysql: ERROR: Using expire_logs_days without log_bin crashes
   2. the server. See README.Debian.gz

   Commenting out the expire_logs_days in the my.cnf file allowed me to restart MySQL.

2. After the upgrade of Apache, my virtual hosts weren't working. A quick search via Google pointed me to this post - a quick edit of all of my host files and it was all working again.
3. the php-mysql connector somehow hadn't been upgraded/installed so a quick
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   1. apt-get install php5-mysql

   fixed that problem.

4. OpenBD : the only thing that remains broken was my tomcat5.5 Open BD install. Tomcat was working fine but Open BD refused to start up complaining about :
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   1. javax.servlet.ServletException: Open BlueDragon Engine Failed to initialise tags: java.awt.Color

   Since I am not really using it, it's not that important, but at some stage I'd like to get it working again. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.