Installing Solr + Tomcat on RHEL5

March 31st, 2010 § 3 comments § permalink

Installing JDK

Download the latest Sun JDK RPM.

  1. Go to java.sun.com and navigate to the downloads page. As of this writing it is http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
  2. If you are on a text console, you may want to use the “links” text browser rather than wget or curl. The Sun site requires you to accept a license agreement before it will allow you to access the download.
  3. Navigate to the downloads for a recent version of the JDK (e.g. JDK 6 update 2).
  4. On the downloads page, download the “Linux RPM in self-extracting file” This will have a name such as jdk-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin
  5. Save the file in a convient location (/tmp would work).

Extract and install the RPM

  1. In the directory that you saved the rpm.bin file, type: 
    ./jdk-6u2-linux-i586-rpm.bin
  2. The JDK should extract and install. There is a licence agreement.

Installing Tomcat

First, download Tomcat from Apache or a mirror site and unpack it.

Next you need to decide where to put Tomcat. You will need a directory for your Tomcat installation and also a place to store your Tomcat applications. This can be the same directory, but does not have to be. The method that I will illustrate here uses /opt/mytomcat for both directories

Often you may need to refer to the directory in which Tomcat is installed. This is stored in the environment variable $CATALINA_HOME (Catalina is Tomcat’s servlet container). Thus, by installing Tomcat into /opt/mytomcat, we can consider /opt/mytomcat to be $CATALINA_HOME.

ln -s /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.23 /opt/mytomcat

Next, you need to decide how you will run Tomcat. Tomcat can be run as root or as a regular user. For security reasons, many people prefer to create a special user account to run Tomcat and to own Tomcat files. In this example, I will show how to set up a ‘mytomcat’ user. You’ll need to do most of the installation and setup as root and can then chown files to be owned by the mytomcat user.

/usr/sbin/groupadd mytomcat
/usr/sbin/useradd -g mytomcat -d /opt/mytomcat mytomcat

Change the directory to be owned by the mytomcat user (and also group mytomcat):

chown mytomcat.mytomcat mytomcat
chown mytomcat.mytomcat apache-tomcat-5.5.23

In order for Tomcat to find the installation of Java, you need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. One way to do this is to create a file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/setenv.sh that contains the following line:

JAVA_HOME="/usr/java/latest"

At this point, we should be able to try starting Tomcat. Since you are probably root, but we want to run Tomcat as user ‘mytomcat’, use ‘su -c’ to run the startup.sh script:

su mytomcat -c $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

If everything worked, you should be able to navigate to http://localhost:8080 and see the Tomcat welcome page.
To stop the server, use:

su mytomcat -c $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh

Installing Solr

Download SOLR from Apache or a mirror, unpack it, and set up a link to it from /opt/solr.

cd /opt
wget ftp://www.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/apache/lucene/solr/1.2/apache-solr-1.2.0.tgz
tar xvzf apache-solr-1.2.0.tgz
ln -s apache-solr-1.2.0.tgz /opt/solr

Change the ownership and group to be mytomcat:

chown -R mytomcat:mytomcat solr
chown -R mytomcat:mytomcat apache-solr-1.2.0

Make a copy of a SOLR webapp. SOLR instances run as web applications in the webapps directory of Tomcat. There is a default application in /opt/solr/dist that is packaged as a .war file. To use this, just copy it over to /opt/mytomcat/webapps and give it a descriptive name:

cp /opt/solr/dist/apache-solr-1.2.0.war /opt/mytomcat/webapps/mytestapp.war
chown mytomcat:mytomcat /opt/mytomcat/webapps/mytestapp.war

SOLR stores its indicies for each instance in a “solr/home” directory. For SOLR webapps that you run, you will need to create a solr/home directory. I put all mine in /opt/solr_home, so that I have directories like /opt/solr_home/app1, /opt/solr_home/app2,… There is a sample directory that you should copy that contains the starting files and directories that SOLR expects for the solr/home:

mkdir /opt/solr_home
cp -R /opt/solr/example/solr /opt/solr_home/mytestapp
chown -R mytomcat:mytomcat /opt/solr_home


Works very well and rather straight out of the box.


All the credit goes to Robert – http://www.ils.unc.edu/~rcapra/rhel5-tomcat-solr.php


The above guide with some minor changes here and there.

        

        
             
       
Listing all your blogposts

      
March 30th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

      
              

                    
So here is a quick snapshot at how to get all your wordpress blogposts using python [or wordpresslib to be specific]


–


#!/usr/bin/env python


import wordpresslib


import tinyurl


wordpress = raw_input('Wordpress URL:')


user = raw_input('Username:')


password = raw_input('Password:')


# prepare client object


wp = wordpresslib.WordPressClient(wordpress, user, password)


# select blog id


wp.selectBlog(0)


posts = wp.getRecentPosts(100)


for p in posts:


if p.title.find("p=")<0:


    print p.title," - ",tinyurl.create_one(p.link)


–


Now that is real easy to use IMHO, i just started using this in one of my scripts. It is easy to use this and plug into other systems which use python !


Resources:



        

        
             
       
RHEL5 : Yum to munin

      
March 18th, 2010 §  3 comments § permalink

      
              

                    
So here are some dead easy ways of getting munin and munin-node installed on your RHEL5 server.


First add RPM Forge repository

 rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm


Then just fire


yum install munin munin-node


Now, you have your munin running. Lets turn our attention to monit.


First add this new repo to you

 rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm


Then go ahead and install monit using

 yum install monit


Now this my friend was real easy ! Have fun , more later.

        

        
             
       
Technically randy

      
March 18th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

      
              

                    
Must ask ! Are you “technically randy” ?


I definitely am :) , i just figured out that i must come out in the open for a change [as if the blog name is not a good indicator]. I love technology and apply it anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity. Though this obviously has its pitfalls, well being randy has its pitfalls. Lets see some of the obvious ones [feel free to comment and fill in the non-obvious ones]


    

  • Depending on what makes your day, you will end up spending up more time than the average joe on simple things ! I would call it the law of diminishing efficiency of the technically randy.
    • 

  • Your boss for one will call you as the office hero, but your co-workers will call you the office pain in the arse. Get ready to be abused and bitched about !
    • 

  • Mines and deep bore wells are your friends ! I mean it in the dual way, you will fall deep into pits of darkness only to emerge with solutions that could have been searched or massaged out of our friendly neighborhood search engines.
    • 

  • You will want a pet ! Or let me rephrase it, you need a pet. Its not a reflection of anything negative, its and overt exploitation of man’s best friend after all. All the time spent in technology, will proportionally reflect in the relationship randiness … you my friend need error correction
    • 



Now that was a lot of fun ! Point is can the social and the nerd exist …. I think it can exist [well, no harm in trying], hopefully my nerd side will post something technically relevant. Until next time.

        

        
             
       
genderless technology

      
March 9th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

      
              

                    
Why one must ask is technology gendered ?


Are 1s and 0s, gendered !


Technology, if we look at only digital technology would count as one of crucial blocks of enabling all [of all colors, of all sizes] to take a pot shot at being successful [in various degrees]. It is hilarious to see how old school individuals who run our country want to empower every class by giving them subsidies [jobs, ration] and not fostering an environment where all can achieve self respect by working towards individual goals.


IT has proved to be an enabler, and a savior [much to the disappointment of politicians] for many families who could have never risen through the ranks of money & power. It is still interesting to see how corruption attempts to regulate the bits and bytes only to fail consistently. We lack IT laws and will continue to lack them, its very difficult to regulate things much beyond imagination of most [the paradigm shift for most politicians]. Our current finance minister cannot probably envision a Open source budget that may happen over the next 15 years, the shift has begun.


We started with gender, and of course i lost track he he … its important to see where it was all going. Bits and bytes are beyond gender ! remove physical strength from the equation [of technology] and the correlation is obvious. Software is maybe the only way of creating a genderless model of technology.

        

        
        
  

    
« Older Entries

    
Newer Entries »