uPortal IRC Logs-2010-12-04

[14:37:44 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> Hi, I was wondering if i could get some help with my first install of Uportal?
[15:01:50 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> ?
[15:02:00 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> where are you installing it knoxy?
[15:02:05 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> and for what purpose?
[15:02:41 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> on a ubuntu virtualmachine. I'm aiming to get it working as if we can we will be scripting the install up and adding it to the server distro for the linux schools project I work on.
[15:02:45 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> will it be a dev type of environment or a multi tomcat type of deployment for production.
[15:03:19 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> it will be for production but only it will be in the tomcat install
[15:03:23 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> a lot of the developers out there use ubuntu... pretty common in fact.
[15:03:57 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> yeah, it has been deployed in other containers.. but it takes a lot of effort. Tomcat is by far the easiest
[15:04:16 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> and the largest, highest volume deployment of uPortal uses tomcat.
[15:04:17 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> so far i have been followering this guide i stumbled upon and the wiki's own manual
[15:04:33 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> http://www.kamenos.info/?p=59
[15:04:37 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> 4 of them in fact and a really nice DB in the back and a nice hardware loadbalancer in the front
[15:04:54 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> thats good that it scales well then
[15:05:17 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> so far im getting build sucessful, but tomcat just hangs when i browse to it via the webbrowser
[15:05:31 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> we used to have as many as 12 frontends.. but it was way overkill
[15:05:45 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> especially with the hardware..
[15:06:01 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> that is odd
[15:06:15 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> if you do a wget from the box... does it hang there as well?
[15:07:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> yeah just sits waiting for response
[15:07:12 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> wow... that is odd
[15:07:21 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> what do the logs show?
[15:07:30 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> which log would you like. uportal.log?
[15:07:35 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> also... did you start off with the Quick-start available at jasig?
[15:07:54 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> no i went with the source version
[15:08:05 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> as i needed to plug it into a mysql database
[15:08:22 CST(-0600)] * lfuller nods
[15:08:40 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> just saying that I would recommend pulling down the quickstart and spinning it up on the box to see if you have the same problem
[15:08:58 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> also... not a big deal to point the quickstart at a different type of db.
[15:09:32 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> ah might go with the quickstart then, are there any big drawbacks with using it?
[15:09:42 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> but... zip the logs up and send them to lfuller@unicon.net
[15:09:50 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> I don't have a lot of time.. but can take a quick look
[15:09:57 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> okiday ill give them a zip up, cheers
[15:10:00 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> then I gotta get back to some coding for pearson
[15:10:20 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> pearson education?
[15:10:24 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> yeah
[15:10:43 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> haha! i was on the student advisory board last year in the UK for pearson ed
[15:10:50 CST(-0600)] <lfuller>
[15:11:16 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> pearson is massive... the folks I work with are out of boston, but most of my dev team is in arizona
[15:11:39 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> unicon started helping them set up a portal about 5 years ago
[15:11:39 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> indeed it is, though i found most of the software came from your side
[15:11:53 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> mostly because Bb could not handle the load and they needed a way to federate course providers
[15:11:59 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> has grown a great deal since then
[15:12:09 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> we have rougly 15+ million users now.
[15:12:19 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> er roughly
[15:13:01 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> growing at a phenomenal rate too.. but uPortal handling the load pretty well.
[15:14:13 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> ah thats very good then
[15:14:26 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> our aim is to have uPortal as the internal school site for students and teachers
[15:14:38 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> with their moodle, koha, timetable etc built in
[15:15:03 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> just to unify everything. Whist we are at it we will use the CAS built into uportal to single sign on our apps as well
[15:15:09 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> we be a nice change
[15:15:13 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> *would
[15:15:35 CST(-0600)] * lfuller nods
[15:15:41 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> lots of folks doing similar things
[15:16:01 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> have a number of coworkers that have helped with very similar projects many times over the last few years.
[15:16:53 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> sweet, well if we get it working well. After some testing we will be putting it into our distro. About 40 schools use it so they would enjoy the facility as well.
[15:17:23 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> lots of these types of errors in catalina.out:
[15:17:26 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> SEVERE: Error starting static Resources
[15:17:26 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Document base /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/uPortal does not exist or is not a readable directory
[15:17:42 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> does the user you are firing it up as have the proper permissions?
[15:17:54 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> or do those resources just not exist?
[15:18:35 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> it exists, and can be read by everyone
[15:18:52 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> any time you fire things up and see SEVERE: at the end... it usually isn't a good sign.
[15:19:03 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> ls -l /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/
[15:19:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> total 52
[15:19:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 7 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 BookmarksPortlet
[15:19:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 8 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 cas
[15:19:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 cas-proxy-test-portlet
[15:19:04 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 FunctionalTestsPortlet
[15:19:05 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 jasig-widget-portlets
[15:19:05 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 pluto-testsuite
[15:19:06 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 5 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 ResourceServingWebapp
[15:19:06 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 3 root root 4096 2010-12-04 19:54 ROOT
[15:19:07 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 4 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 RssPortlet
[15:19:07 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 uPortal
[15:19:08 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 11 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:08 uPortal-3.2.2
[15:19:08 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 8 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 WeatherPortlet
[15:19:09 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> drwxrwxrwx 4 root root 4096 2010-12-04 20:19 WebProxyPortlet
[15:19:09 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> sorry for the very large message
[15:19:15 CST(-0600)] * lfuller does not have a ton of experience with CAS, have a some friends that work with it a lot, but I haven't had a chance yet.
[15:19:27 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> i realise the permissions are very free at the moment
[15:19:43 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> but i shot 777 at it earlier to see if it was permissions doing something
[15:19:52 CST(-0600)] * lfuller nods... just get it working first...
[15:21:32 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> JDBC driver class [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]; nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:21:32 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> Caused by: org.springframework.jdbc.CannotGetJdbcConnectionException: Could not load JDBC driver class [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]; nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:21:32 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:21:51 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> that could be old I guess..
[15:22:02 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> but not real old since it is in a log file created today
[15:22:19 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> in localhost.2010-12-04.log
[15:22:43 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> where did you put the mysql drivers at?
[15:23:23 CST(-0600)] * lfuller has used oracle and postgres a ton... but have not played with mysql in years.
[15:24:12 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> I didnt grab any, i just added the dependancies into the pom.xml and specified the connection in the rdbm.properties file. Seemed to work when compiled as it created the database
[15:24:25 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> and a mysql-connector-java-5.1.10.jar appared in the uportal lib folder
[15:25:10 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> the error stopped when i copied that to /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/ folder but it still didnt load uportal even after a restart of tomcat
[15:25:22 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> it is under WEB-INF/lib/ ?
[15:25:40 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> ok... so it is most likely an old error then
[15:25:50 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> yeah its under that
[15:26:11 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> sometimes it helps to wipe the logs out... and start it up again. That way we are only looking at the current issues.
[15:26:35 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> okiday i'll give them a clear out
[15:26:56 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> yeah.. and if it isn't too much trouble, zip them up and send them to me
[15:29:02 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> All of pearson's deployments and all but one of the developers are running on ubuntu or some other flavor of *nix. We don't use a linux distro to do it though..
[15:29:41 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> haha its probally me doing something silly then
[15:29:51 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> might be nice to have.
[15:30:32 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> or something conflicting, its the problem when we are building on a distro with a lot of applications. Sometimes we get the occasional conflict
[15:30:39 CST(-0600)] * lfuller has found a lot of folks do there deployments different ways. As long as it works... and you are happy with it, who cares?
[15:31:01 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> er their
[15:31:46 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> look at your localhost...
[15:31:50 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> all is not well there still
[15:32:29 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> org.springframework.jdbc.CannotGetJdbcConnectionException: Could not load JDBC driver class [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]; nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:32:29 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> Caused by: org.springframework.jdbc.CannotGetJdbcConnectionException: Could not load JDBC driver class [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]; nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:32:29 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[15:33:16 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> with the quick deploy.. you have a working environment that you can then mutate... in doing that you'll learn what breaks it.
[15:33:21 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> hmmm very strange, it seems ant initportal can connect to create everything, but later doesn't use its module to re connect and read the database
[15:33:46 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> once you get a quick deploy working with mysql, I think getting this up and running will be easy for you.
[15:34:05 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> is sort of hard for me to trouble shoot things without digging into it out on your box.
[15:34:29 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> okiday ill go the quick deploy, if it means i can mutate it to use another database backend
[15:35:10 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> is just a good way to learn what works I think.. .since it started out working
[15:35:36 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> that is its purpose, I don't think anyone really uses it for a production environment.. but it is a good way to play with things at first.
[15:35:37 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> indeed ill be able to work out if it's something getting in the way somewhere or wether its the building from scratch thats borking it
[15:36:28 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> bear in mind that uPortal is kind of going through a transition right now. There are some old school sql interactions going on as well as some newer hibernate JPA interactions with the database.
[15:37:07 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> that may mean a missed config or two somewhere if you are manually tweaking uPortal.
[15:37:16 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> ah okiday
[15:37:26 CST(-0600)] <lfuller> anyway... am afraid I need to get back to work... have fun
[15:37:36 CST(-0600)] <knoxy> cheers for your help