Recreating Playground

Installing CentOS and WWO onto playground

This page is notes for re-creating the WWO environment from RH 6.10 (wwp.neu.edu) to CentOS 8.2 (playground). It will serve as a guide to start, and then hopefully a useful description for future similar upgrades.

CentOS

Installing CentOS was essentially trivial. We used the CentOS-8.2.2004-x86_64-boot.iso.

It appears that yum has been superceded by dnf.

Things we should or have installed

• Emacs — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install emacs-nox.x86_64`
• Emacs/nxml — was automagically installed by above (and has nice colors! :-)
• make — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install make.x86_64`
• Subversion — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install subversion.x86_64`
• libxml2/xmllint — libxml2-2.9.7-7.el8.x86_64 is already installed
• libxslt/xsltproc — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install libxslt.x86_64`
• ant — intsalled 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install ant.noarch`
• screen — nope, Red Hat recommends tmux instead — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install tmux.x86_64`
• Tomcat — no yum package found
  • downloaded the “Core” tarball off of https://tomcat.apache.org/download-90.cgi
  • stored it in /usr/local/src/
  • following instructions in RUNNING.txt ...
  • unarchived it to /usr/local/share/
  • created ./bin/setenv.sh in the resulting apache-tomcat-9.0.40/
  • created symlinks for work/ temp/ and logs/ (just copying what we have on current production system)
  • following instructions at https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/setup.html ...
• git — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install git.x86_64` (installed 46 dependencies, mostly Perl packages)
• eXist — no yum package found
• MariaDB (maybe? maybe not)
• lessc (pkg = node-less) — no yum package found
  • Ash checked, they recommend installing via npm
  • npm — installed 2020-12-02 with `sudo dnf install npm.x86_64`
  • installed lessc with `sudo npm install less -g`
• Perl — v 5.26.3 already installed
• PHP — installed 2020-11-30 with `sudo yum install php.x86_64`
• Python — I do not know if we want version 3.6 or 3.8 (or 2.7, which I doubt); see the RHEL8 doc
• Awstats —not found
• locate — already installed, but need to generate and cronify udpatedb; done 2020-11-30, I think. Ran `sudo /usr/bin/updatedb` and now `locate` seems to work. Symlinked /usr/bin/updatedb to /etc/cron.daily/updatedb. Hope that works. I think we check by loooking at timestamp of /var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db.
• gcc — installed 2020-12-02 with `sudo dnf install gcc.x86_64`

Apache modules, etc.

• mod_jk
• server side includes
• whatever we need for security and textbaseIP stuff
• redirection stuff

November 2019 notes

“playground” is the name Ashley & Syd give to the box they are using for experimentations. (Currently for web stat packages.) This page describes a procedure for installing a CentOS (i.e., RedHat clone) OS on it quickly.

• Remember to back up iptables and restore it
• We re-set the clock with instructions from a website we found.