OPenOffice previewer crashing

[andyhorton]

Hello,

I have Alfresco 4 installed on CentOS. From time to time Alfresco shares stops previewing documents. A reboot of the system seems to fix it. Weirdly, restarting Alfresco alone does not fix it - although I need to check that as I cannot see why that would be the case. Anyway, I have looked into this a little bit (thanks DuckDuckGo). I can find if the OpenOffice previewer is working by running:

root# ps -ax | grep office

This returns a non-important error, and the information I am looking for:

Warning: bad syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See /usr/share/doc/procps-3.2.8/FAQ
2996 pts/0    Sl     0:54    /opt/alfresco/openoffice/program/soffice.bin -accept=socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager -env:UserInstallation=file:///opt/alfresco/alf_data/oouser -nologo -headless -nofirststartwizard -nocrashrep -norestore

If the /opt/alfresco/openoffice…. item does not return, then I know that the previewer will not work.

So, my questions for you the wonderful people of the Alfresco forum are…

1. Why does this crash? What can be done to stop it crashing?

2. Once crashed, why does it not start when Alfresco is restarted?

3. Once crashed, can it be run manually. I have tried running the full command (with nohup and &) but it does not  produce the results I am looking for. That is, documents do not preview.

Help, as ever, gratefully received.

Andy

[andyhorton]

*BUMP*

Anybody got any ideas?

[ashex]

I've been experiencing this problem and am currently investigating it, can you post your config for openoffice? I'm running CentOS 6.2

ooo.exe=/usr/bin/soffice
ooo.enabled=true
jodconverter.officeHome=/usr/bin/openoffice.org
jodconverter.portNumbers=8101
jodconverter.enabled=true
img.exe=/usr/bin/convert
swf.exe=/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf

[telesight]

When I upload an .odt document and I want to preview it, I get the message that the system can not give a preview of the document.


Configuration:
Alfresco installed with alfresco-community-4.0.d-installer-linux-x64.bin
on Ubuntu 10.04 in a Proxmox virtual environment.

[andyhorton]

Ashex,

Here is my OO config:

### External executable locations ###
ooo.exe=/opt/alfresco/openoffice/program/soffice.bin
ooo.enabled=true
ooo.port=8100
ooo.port=8100
img.root=/opt/alfresco/common
img.dyn=${img.root}/lib
img.exe=${img.root}/bin/convert
swf.exe=/opt/alfresco/common/bin/pdf2swf
jodconverter.enabled=false
jodconverter.officeHome=/opt/alfresco/openoffice
jodconverter.portNumbers=8100

What does this tell you?

[ashex]

Remove that second ooo.port, don't think that'll cause issues but it's not needed. You should also commend out the jodconvertor lines since you're running community.

Looks like you're using the alfresco bin installed, I setup ours from scratch. My recommendation would be to test that you can still connect to the document server when it stops working in alfresco. You can try doing a simple telnet but that wouldn't be enough, you should probably install jodconverter and try converting a document.

Also, check your logs as OOOdirect can be very verbose when it stops working. I think for the binary installer it'll be /opt/alfresco/alfresco.log, check what it's set to in log4j.properties under $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes

My issue turned out to be a missing package, I still have problems with complex documents but it's not related.

To answer your other questions, you should be able to start OpenOffice manually (I did that while testing) by running the same command with the proper args.

[andyhorton]

Remove that second ooo.port, don't think that'll cause issues but it's not needed. You should also commend out the jodconvertor lines since you're running community.

Did that, and the previewer does not seem to have crashed since then.

Thanks.

Andy