Problem with Ubuntu 7.10 Install

[ghernando]

I've tried to install the community version 2.1.0 of Alfresco on Ubuntu 7.10 using these instructions:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Alfresco_on_Ubuntu_7.10

Basically did everything there.  The only real difference is that that the wiki page is using the Enterprise version rather than the community one.

It sort of works.  But I can't get the init.d/alfresco startup/stop to work.

Alfresco starts if I manually run:
alfresco.sh start

But if I try to run /etc/init.d, the Tomcat page will come up, but not the Alfresco application.

The init.d given on the Alfresco page does a remapping thing with ports.  I'm not sure if that has something to do with it.  I don't understand why it needs to do that either.

I see other people are having ubuntu problems as well.
Maybe someone can revisit the wiki page to correct whatever might be wrong with those instructions?

Thanks!

[pmonks]

When you started Alfresco manually, did you start it as root?  Alfresco is quite sensitive to file permissions, particularly in the alf_data directory, so starting Alfresco as the same user every single time is pretty important.  It's easy to inadvertently change users when you configure Alfresco to start automatically.

The port remappings are needed because some of the protocols Alfresco serves (CIFS, FTP, NFS and SMTP) use privileged ports, so on *nix systems Alfresco either has to be running as root or else those ports need to be remapped to non-privileged ports with iptables or the like used to forward the privileged ports as needed (some of the clients for these protocols cannot be configured to use alternative ports eg. the CIFS client built into Windows, hence the need for port forwarding).

Another potential hiccup is that currently Alfresco has a small number of known issues on JDK 1.6, and I believe that's the version that's bundled with recent releases of Ubuntu by default.  The problem you're seeing here is not related to JDK versions, but it's something to keep in mind going forward.

[richks]

I have exactly the same problem.

Tomcat is running, Alfresco is not.

[steve]

Hi,
The Ubuntu instructions were contributed by a community member as what worked for them. However, I have actually used them successfully on one of my machines and I found them very thorough.

One reason you might have issues is if you haven't hardcoded your path to the 'alf_data' dir since you are starting tomcat (and thus Alfresco) from two different locations. If your 'alf_data' path isn't hardcoded it won't like it!

Also, both to 'ghernando' and especially 'RichKS' - post your errors in the log files - we can't read your minds to find out what the errors you are seeing are, we need you to post those errors.  :wink:

Steve

[ghernando]

Where do you mean to hardcode the alf_data path?

There is an entry in custom-repository.properties :
dir.root=/var/lib/alfresco/alf_data

Is there anywhere else.  I am already doing that.

Thanks for your help!