i-am.ws

I-am.WS

All blog entries below this one were written as part of my "blogs.sun.com" weblog. But that blog comes to an end, because around Xmas 2009 I left Oracle/Sun to join Cisco. Similar role, Datacenter Architect for Cisco's new UCS platform, later more about that. As a consequence, I can't add to my old blog anymore and I presume that anyway blogs.sun.com will soon be rolled into one of Oracles blogging sites.

For me, time to figure out another venue. I decided to install my own apache-roller (the same blogging software Sun was using), on a box in my basement running Apache and Tomcat. One of the reasons for going this route was that, couple of years ago, I managed to acquire the domain name "i-am.ws". "WS" being my initials, that seemed pretty appropriate as the new name for a blogging site. The sat image in the header is West Samoa, where these domains originate from.

This not being a "what did we have for dinner" blog, but rather more "food for techies", I have to share here a few of my experiences moving my blog from Sun's IT into my basement. The laptop I'm using, is a "goldie-oldie" PII with 256 MB of RAM. That dates it pretty well and therefore it is running RedHat EL3, nothing fancier, but hey, it's doing the job. Therefore it also has an older MySQL version (3.23.58), the same for glibc, etc.

At first I tried to install latest-greatest Roller 4, which became a disaster, all kinds of dependency conflicts. And that makes sense, on top of a 5 year OS you better build a five year old software stack. However, it can be a little scramble to find all the older sw packages. In this case I "dropped down" to Roller 3.1, picked Java 1.5 SE JDK and Tomcat 5.5. Which combination seems to work pretty well together.

The bigger challenge was that my i-am.ws domain points to another webserver on my LAN, which functions as a proxy to my CMS-Made-Simple, my Myth-Web box and now this Roller instance on Tomcat. Typically I fix the fact that different domains are being served by the same webserver, by creating an Apache HTTPD "Virtual Host" with the following parameters.

    ServerName ecliptic.net
    ServerAlias www.ecliptic.net
    ServerAdmin webmaster@ecliptic.net
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ecliptic.net

But in this situation, that's not enough. We've to proxy to the tomcat server on the other box. Therefore we need to add a couple of 'ProxyPass' and 'ProxyPassReverse' parameters. The following isn't perfect, but I wanted to have "/" (the root of my domain) point to "/roller/wwwillem" on the Tomcat engine. Which makes things a little trickier.

    ServerName i-am.ws
    ServerAlias www.i-am.ws
    ServerAdmin webmaster@i-am.ws
    ProxyPass /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/
    ProxyPassReverse /roller/roller-ui/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/roller-ui/
    ProxyPass /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/
    ProxyPassReverse /roller/theme/ http://192.168.1.23:8080/roller/theme/
    ProxyPass / http://192.168.1.23:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.23:8080/
    ProxyPass /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/
    ProxyPassReverse /wwwillem/ http://192.168.1.23:80/
    ProxyPass / http://192.168.32.54:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.1.23:8080/
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_access.log common
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/i-am-ws_error.log

Finally, the biggest problem is that Roller generates in many spots HTML with the base URL hard baked into the code. So, if the browser finds the Tomcat application with "i-am.ws" or even "i-am.ws/roller/wwwillem" the html page will be created with hard-coded links to http://http://192.168.1.23:8080/. These should have been relative links of course and probably Roller 4.0 fixed a lot of that, but after googling this for a long time, it seems that there are still many issues around this. I searched for an Apache module that would scrape the html returned to make the necessary corrections, but such a thing doesn't seem to exist.

Anyway, for me the most important thing is to have my WebLog up and running again. In some future I will probably upgrade the whole thing to some newer platform (likely CentOS 6 when that's out, or Fedora 12), but for now, this is good enough. As usual, it was a good learning experience.

Posted at 11:41PM Mar 15, 2010 by WWWillem in Software  |