Installing on RHEL 4 ES, with JBoss and PostgreSQL

[vitoc]

Hello, I'm a new Member of this Forum.
I'm trying to install Alfresco but without success. :=(
My system configuration are RHEL 4 ES, JBoss 4.0.4.GA and PostgreSQL 8.1.4
I'm in trouble with the installation of Alfresco community on this configuration.
I've had followed the instructions about postgres and jboss but not sucessfuly.
Coud anyone help me and send me a step by step to do Alfresco works on the configuration on the subject above?

Thanks
Vito

[martinbradford]

Hi there,

I have recently installed the 1.4RC with Jboss and Postgres and can confirm that there are some installation issues. Follow all the instructions in the Wiki for setting a custom database connection and hibernate dialect. I know that it should be obvious, but I don't think the instructions make it sufficiently clear that you need the appropriate JDBC driver in the classpath - the Alfresco installation images do not include all of them - certainly not Postgres - so you need to copy a suitable driver into the "jboss\server\default\lib" directory - I am using postgresql-8.1-404.jdbc3.jar which seems to work fine.

You will have to create the database manually in Postgres - I don't think the initdb scripts that ship with Alfresco are compatible with Postgres - just use pgAdmin or psql to create a database - name does not really matter so long as it is consistent with the value in the custom-db-connection.properties file. I created a postgres user specifically for Alfresco and set that as the database owner - again not really necessary, but what you do in the database must be consistent with the properties file.

The theory is that you create an empty database and the Alfresco bootstrap populates it the first time it is run. That seems to work fine on mysql, but not on Postgres (and possibly not on Oracle either). When you start alfresco for the first time, you will probably get several rather uninformative SQL exceptions thrown reproting syntax errors and rolled back transactions. Fortunately, the Alfresco bootstrap creates the database initialization scripts in a tempory file first and then executes them - when the execution fails, the file is left laying around and you can get a copy and run it manually.

Try to start Alfresco and let it run till after the bootstrap has failed - you may want to redirect the error messages into a text file 'cos you are going to have to search through them - actually, they probably are already logged into one of the JBoss logs anyway. Read through the messages till you get the first SQL related error, then read carefully the first few lines of the error report. Hidden in the text, it should include the full path and name of the tempory file which it is trying to execute - find it and make a copy (the bootstrap will delete it after successful execution and it is handy to have a copy for subsequent installations).

In my case, at least, there was nothing actually wrong with the script and it executed without error through psql - the problem seems to be something to do with the way Alfresco executes it, not the content. Of course, I've only done this a couple of times, so cannot be sure that there are not circumstances under which the script does not need modification. Just try to run it and check carefully for errors - if there are any, try to fix them or report them here. Make sure that you log in to psql using the same user id that Alfresco will connect with - on one occasion I executed the script logged in as "postgres" and then spent ages wondering why Alfresco was failing with database permissions errors!

The script will create all the necessary tables but leave them empty. If you restart Alfresco, the bootstrap will pick up where it left off and should run to completion…

Hope that solves it

Martin Bradford

[vitoc]

Hello, thanks for your help, but for now alfresco don't run.
I followed these actions:

- untar alfresco-community-jboss-1.3.0.tar.gz in /opt/alfresco-1.3.0
- untar jboss-4.0.4.GA-Patch1-installer.jar in /opt/jboss-4.0.4.GA

My db is PostgreSQL 8.1.4

I remove the .sample extension from the following files:

/opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/server/default/conf/alfresco/extension/custom-db-and-data-context.xml.sample
/opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/server/default/conf/alfresco/extension/custom-db-connection.properties.sample
/opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/server/default/conf/alfresco/extension/custom-hibernate-dialect.properties.sample
/opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/server/default/conf/alfresco/extension/custom-data-location.properties.sample

    * Copy the PostgreSQL driver JAR (postgresql-8.1-407.jdbc3.jar) to /opt/jboss-4.0.4.GA/server/default/lib and to /opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/server/default/lib

    * Create a new 'alfresco' user and database. Set this user's password to 'alfresco'.
    * Ensure that the alfresco user has the required privileges to create and modify tables.

    * Override following repository properties in custom-db-connection.properties:
db.driver=org.postgresql.Driver
db.name=alfresco
db.url=jdbcostgresql://localhost/alfresco
db.username=alfresco
db.password=alfresco

    * Override the following Hibernate property in custom-hibernate-dialect.properties:
hibernate.dialect=org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect

        * Ensure that the postgresql.conf file (pg_hba.conf for postgres 8.1.3) contains:

host    all    all    127.0.0.1/32    password

… to allow password-authenticated connections via TCP/IP.

I set on the script /opt/t/alfresco-1.3.0/alfresco.sh APPSERVER=/opt/jboss-4.0.4.GA

then I launched the script but nothing it's happened.
If I launch the script /opt/alfresco-1.3.0/jboss/bin/run.sh start jboss portal but alfresco no.
Why when I I launchvthe script /opt/t/alfresco-1.3.0/alfresco.sh don't start JBoss AS.
Are correct the operations that I made?

regards

[martinbradford]

What is the command that you are running? It should be "alfresco.sh start" to start Alfresco and "alfresco.sh stop" to shut it down. If you give a parameter of anything other than "start", it will silently ignore it! This is for version 1.4, at least - I've never used 1.3.

Martin