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Info
Release Date: TBD

Warning
SSP 2.8 requires Java JDK 1.8 and Tomcat 8. No other versions of Java or Tomcat will work. Both Java and Tomcat must be updated prior to installing SSP 2.8.

Info

For all existing installations of 2.0.X and 2.1.X, important upgrade instructions exist in the previous 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5.1, 2.5.2 and 2.6.0 Release notes.

To upgrade from any previous v2.0.0-v2.6.0 follow the Release Notes for previous versions

New installations of 2.8.0 are not required to make any additional change

If you are running a SSP version prior to 1.1.1, you are strongly encouraged to upgrade or otherwise apply the reporting subsystem security patches described by SSP-701.

If you are running SSP version 2.0.0 or 2.0.0-b3, you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 2.0.1 or 2.1.0 or 2.2.0 or later or otherwise apply the Confidentiality Level-related patches for the Student Documents tool as described by SSP-1917.

Also please take a few minutes to review additional security-related announcements detailed at the top of the SSP space here in Confluence.

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JDK 1.8 is required starting with SSP v2.8.0. JAVA SE jdk 1.7 will no longer work. The SSP development team has also observed somewhat better GC performance with the Sun/Oracle JDK vs OpenJDK)
- Environment Variable: JAVA_HOME
  Tip
  title Java Environment Variable
  JAVA_HOME=/path/to/your/java (ie: /usr/local/java or C:\java\jdk)
  
  (optional)
  PATH= append the bin subdirectory to the path statement

Tomcat 8.X (Tomcat 6 is not supported as of the 2.8 release)

Instructions for installing and configuring Tomcat for the SSP-Platform (uPortal 4.0). Last known good link to download Tomcat is here: Tomcat 6.
Warning
title Tomcat Configuration
It is important to complete sections:

Environment Variables,

Shared Libraries, Shared Sessions, Context and Java Heap.

1. Minimally, the catalina.properties file must contain:

shared.loader=${catalina.base}/shared/lib/*.jar

2. And your active connector/s in <tomcat>/conf/server.xml must have the emptySessionPath flag set:

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"

connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" emptySessionPath="true"/>

And increase

3. (new in Tomcat 8) The context must be updated with two changes. The context.xml should be modified with an updated Context tag and new lines for Resources. The following excerpt can replace the existing section.

<Context crossContext="true" sessionCookiePath="/">

    <!-- Default set of monitored resources. If one of these changes, the    -->
    <!-- web application will be reloaded.                                   -->
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <WatchedResource>${catalina.base}/conf/web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <Resources cachingAllowed="true" cacheMaxSize="100000" />

    <!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->
    <!--
    <Manager pathname="" />
    -->
</Context>

4. Increase the heap in <tomcat>/bin/setenv.sh (*nix) or <tomcat>/bin/setenv.bat (Windows). Smaller sizing is probably feasible, but the examples below match what our SSP CI envs run with. For production systems, start with a max heap of roughly half available physical memory and increase from there if necessary.

The uPortal instructions above recommend using JAVA_OPTS for heap sizing. This can lead to problems on memory constrained systems because JAVA_OPTS will be used when trying to stop Tomcat with its own scripts. You don't typically need a large heap at all for that operation. So CATALINA_OPTS is a better choice for sizing the heap in setenv scripts, because that var will only be used for Tomcat's http-serving runtime.

setenv.sh:

CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms2G -Xmx2G -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

setenv.bat (uPortal instructions linked to above are missing the 'set'):

set CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms2G -Xmx2G -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Additionally, a performance improvement has been experienced by enabling compression in Tomcat

Tip

Add compression="force" to the server.xml in the connector like the following:

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1

connectionTimeout="20000"

redirectPort="8443"

emptySessionPath="true"

compression="force" />

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