Saturday, January 11, 2014

Installing Apache on Ubuntu: apt-get versus doing a classic configure through make install process

We've been creating new virtual servers at work using Ubuntu snapshots on Openstack.

Most of these new instances are, unfortunately, bare bones. This is due to Openstack being new to most of us; and as our config engineers start to create more robust template snapshots - hopefully won't be as bare-bones going forward.

I was told by my manager during the initial setup that I shouldn't use apt-get for the installation of Jenkins. I was curious about that but didn't inquire at the time.

A day ago I did try using apt-get after my initial build of Apache 2.2 ran into issues when I enabled all modules.

At the initial install using apt-get I noted that the default install directory was under /etc/apache2.

Another unconventional difference was putting the port where the apache HTTP server runs into the ports.conf file under the root directory. I tried to override this by updating httpd.conf but that was not read when I restarted.

Finally I realized I had to use a2enmod command to install the rewrite module and then use the service command to restart Apache.

Ultimately, after all these quirky changes for Apache on Ubuntu, I tried to rebuild using the tar distribution I built earlier.

This time I specified all the modules that I wanted when I did configure on the command line [in addition to those supplied by default], ran make and did a make install. I was then able to start Apache and configure everything in httpd.conf under the conf directory.

Sometimes going back to the classic installation method is the best way to go.


Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Eclipse > Customizing the project explorer view. Not showing external libraries in your root directory

I do almost all of my automation development in Eclipse these days.

I usually import most projects through the Eclipse maven plugin, and then I can check out/in files through the Perforce plugin.

Before I build in Eclipse I usually run mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip=true, after I've gotten the latest changes from the depot.

The most recent time I did an mvn eclipse:eclipse -DdownloadSources=true build that reset my Eclipse project explorer view and one project I used started to show all the imported JAR files in the root directory making it bit cumbersome to use.

I was helped by a colleague to customize my view with the downward caret looking symbol to the right of the project explorer view.

Here are some screenshots:

After selecting the Customize View, scroll down to Libraries from Extenal and select the associated checkbox, then save.


This should resolve all the JARs showing in your root directory.


Exploring ELK (Elastic) Stack for hack-a-thon

At my current gig, our group finally got to do hack-a-thon week and I joined a team project that tied together a few of the technologies I&#...