Running multiple Tomcat 6 instances in Ubuntu, the quick and dirty way

Here's a quick list for running multiple Tomcat 6 instances on Ubuntu 10.04 :

• Copy the /etc/init.d/tomcat script with a new name in the same directory


• Update the NAME variable in the startup script with a name for the new instance that you want to run.


• Copy /usr/share/$(old)NAME to the (new) NAME you've just created, along with /var/lib/$(old)NAME and /etc/default/$(old)NAME


• Edit the server.xml file under /var/lib/$(new)NAME/conf/ and change all the ports (ie for shutdown, and all your Connectors) so that they don't conflict with the old instance


• Run /etc/init.d/$(new tomcat script name) start

You should now have a running, fully functional instance of Tomcat on the server, using a different port.

Setting up Tomcat (5.5) on Ubuntu Server 8.10

I recently ran into some old quirks when provisioning a new server for our company's web applications on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Because the manager apps are no longer installed by default, you need to add extra packages to the list to install when installing Tomcat :

sudo apt-get install -y tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps

If you're copying configuration over from a previous Tomcat / Ubuntu installation, you need to make sure the permissions on all the files you copy are set correctly. In most cases, you'll have to run :

chown -R tomcat55:adm [file and folder list here]

If you're securing the applications with a certificate, try to make sure it's valid for your location and ensure that you've set it properly in your server.xml configuration file. If you want useful logging, you'll also have to place a log4j.properties file in

$CATALINA_HOME/common/classes

Hope this helps.

Ubuntu 9.04 servers slow to login

Recently our production system's servers have been getting progressively slower, and it has finally gotten to the point where it's merited my full attention to remedy the situation. In my research on the problem, one of the things I came across was how incredibly slow the logins were (among other problems). After watching top during numerous logins, I saw that console-kit-daemon was going horribly slow and shooting the sshd CPU usage through the roof. After some time googling for issues related to console-kit-daemon, I found that many people were getting errors in their /var/log/daemon.log file regarding console-kit-daemon being unable to initialize policykit. After installing policykit, my logins to my production servers are now lightning fast

Keeping your servers up to date

As I've previously mentioned on this blog, our company uses Ubuntu for our servers. I won't re-iterate the reasons why in this post, you can search this blog using an Ubuntu tag if you're interested in them. Our servers have uptimes of months and months, and as a result, the clocks on the machines tend to drift over time, which has inspired me to start using NTP to keep the clocks synchronized. A quick Google search yielded the desired results. In order to manually synchronize with NTP, you can run the following commands :

sudo /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate

sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Obviously, entering this command every day or every week gets tiresome and stupid, so you can get cron to schedule this daily for you by running the following commands :

echo "sudo ntpdate ntp.ubuntu.com" >> /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate
chmod 755 /etc/cron.daily/ntpdate

Fixing package retrieval quirks in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Server

In the default installation of Ubuntu Server (Gutsy Gibbon), the default source of packages is the CD-ROM drive. That's fine if you make the assumption that there will always be somebody physically present in order to maintain the servers, but for most server's these days, that's a fallacious assumption. The really bad part about this default, is that there's no way I know of at the time of this writing to override this on the update command. In our company, we have our servers hosted off-site like so many other companies, so everything must be done remotely. Therefore, the CD-ROM as a source for Ubuntu packages is a bad idea. To remedy this, you have to go into the apt-get configuration stored at

/etc/apt/sources.list

, and you'll have to find a line similar to :

deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 7.10 _Gutsy Gibbon_ - Release i386 (20071016)]/ gutsy main restricted

Comment out this line, try your update again and you should be good to go.