ERROR SocketOpenOfficeConnection disconnected unexpectedly

[danniemstanley]

I am running Alfresco  2.1.0 stable release and OpenOffice 2.1 (the one bundled with the Alfresco 2.1 RC1).

OpenOffice seems to die regularly causing transformations to not work correctly.  Here is the only thing that shows up in the log:

ERROR [openoffice.connection.SocketOpenOfficeConnection] disconnected unexpectedly‍

Anyone also experiencing this?  Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot it?

[derek]

Hi,

You say transformations are not working correctly.  Do you get any results in the Web Client if you search for "nitf" ?

Regards

[danniemstanley]

BY the way I am running on RedHat if that makes any difference.  Do I get a result back when I search for nitf? No. At least not when soffice.bin is running.

The way I know that the transformations aren't working because soffice.bin is dead is because I login to the server and the process isn't running.  When I restart Alfresco the soffice.bin restarts and all is well.

By the way can you restart just OpenOffice or do you have to restart alfresco? In my experience simply starting OpenOffice from the shell start script doesn't work.  It must not "get connected to the alfresco instance".

Thanks,
Dannie

[derek]

Hi,
The OpenOffice connection will reconnect if the OO server is started again.  However, the OO-related transformations require OO to be present when the server starts or they will just switch off.  Once the transformation engine has initialized, OO can go up and down.
Regards

[sacco]

Hi,
However, the OO-related transformations require OO to be present when the server starts or they will just switch off.

Does this mean that we should really have a check in the startup scripts to ensure that OO is up and accepting connections?

[derek]

There is a check in the startup logs but it is non-fatal by default.  Look at the javadocs for OpenOfficeConnectionTester and the bean in content-services-context.xml, which can be overridden.

[sacco]

There is a check in the startup logs but it is non-fatal by default.  Look at the javadocs for OpenOfficeConnectionTester and the bean in content-services-context.xml, which can be overridden.

Thanks.

Yes, I'd seen that.  What I meant, though, is that I the start-up script 
(alfresco.sh) starts Alfresco then starts OO.  From what you said above,
this creates a race condition: if the Alfresco server performs its check
before OO is ready then transformations will be disabled, even if OO
is actually available.

In practice, of course, OO tends to be ready much faster than Alfresco,
but this may not necessarily remain so, and, for example, the supplied
alfresco.sh suggests starting the Virtualisation server before OO.

[derek]

Yes.  We're introducing a bootstrap bean to start the process as part of the Enterprise bug fix cycle for 2.1.0 Enterprise.  Also, the transformers and extractors that use the OpenOffice connection will be allowed to go up and down regardless of the initial state of the connection.

[danniemstanley]

I figured out the problem.  The soffice.bin process was dying when I logged out of my SSH session.  I have SSH configured to tunnel X sessions (which was convenient for registering OO).  I did not have Xvfb configured.  Once I installed Xvfb and configured virtual DISPLAY :1 the behavior stopped.  So I assume that something was being tunneled to my desktop X server and when I killed the X tunnel it killed the soffice.bin process.