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It appears that yum has been superceded by dnf.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, so see detailed description below
• MariaDB (maybe? maybe not)
• CouchDB (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 setup, modules, etc.

We (Syd & Ash) worked on configuring the web server for awhile, but were still having problems. Ernesto (user=nestochan) gave us a hand, performed some firewall magic, and now it is working. Need to find out what he did.

• server side includes
• whatever we need for security and textbaseIP stuff
  • mod_jk
  • /etc/httpd/passwd/
• redirection stuff (mostly part of configuration)

other things to be moved over

• WWO
• WWP website
  • including configuration files
  • include git repos per /var/www/html/WWP/lab/README-WWP
• eXist applications (see WWP_eXist-DB_applications)
• either Awstats or something better
  • remember, /usr/local/bin/rgxg is used by Awstats
• WordPress
• /usr/local/bin/wwpwwwup.bash

things to be moved only to wwp-test

• MediaWiki
• CouchDB and the data produced for Cultures of Reception

things we need help with

• MediaWiki (Karl)
• WordPress (Karl)
• documenting what was done to firewall (Ernesto)
• mod_jk?

eXist-DB

`wget` the JAR file from [1]. WWP is currently using eXist v4.7.1, but will soon be upgrading to 5.x.

useradd --home-dir /opt/local/eXistDB --create-home --system existdb
chmod 0775 /usr/local/eXistDB
sudo su - existdb

Add environmental variables to .bash_profile:

export EXIST_HOME=/opt/local/eXistDB/eXist-current
export RUN_AS_USER=existdb

Then, in the terminal:

source ~/.bash_profile
java -jar /tmp/exist-4.5.0-setup.jar -console

As part of the install process, you'll be asked for a directory path for the newly-installed database. Use /opt/local/eXistDB/eXist-VERSION , where VERSION is the version number. Set the administrator password rather than leaving the field blank.

Create a symlink: `ln -s eXist-VERSION eXist-current`.

Navigate into eXist-current, aka $EXIST_HOME.

Create a backup of $EXIST_HOME/tools/jetty/etc/jetty-http.xml.orig, for example:

cp tools/jetty/etc/jetty-http.xml tools/jetty/etc/jetty-http.xml.orig

Edit the Jetty file and set the HTTP port to 8088 from 8080.

Create a backup of $EXIST_HOME/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml, then edit it. Set `//init-param[param-name = ('xquery-submission', 'xupdate-submission')]` to "authenticated".

Create a backup of $EXIST_HOME/conf.xml Set `//serializer/@indent` to "no". Set `//indexer/@preserve-whitespace-mixed-content` to "yes". Add Saxon settings to `//transformer[@class eq 'net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl']`:

<attribute name="http://saxon.sf.net/feature/recoveryPolicyName"
           value="recoverWithWarnings"
           type="string"/>
<attribute name="http://saxon.sf.net/feature/strip-whitespace"
           value="none"
           type="string"/>

Install eXist as a service

eXist comes with YAJSW, which acts as a wrapper daemon to run eXist automatically on server boot. YAJSW configuration files and scripts can be found at $EXIST_HOME/tools/yajsw.

Create a backup of $EXIST_HOME/tools/yajsw/conf/wrapper.conf. Change "wrapper.app.account" to `existdb\\existdb`. Previous installations have also changed "wrapper.java.command", "wrapper.console.title", "wrapper.ntservice.name", and "wrapper.daemon.pid.dir", but they aren't essential.

As root:

EXIST_HOME=/opt/local/eXistDB/eXist-current RUN_AS_USER=existdb /opt/local/eXistDB/eXist-current/tools/yajsw/bin/installDaemon.sh

You may have the option to run the eXist service through "non-privileged systemd" or "privileged systemV-init". Playground currently (2020-12-04) uses systemd. Not sure what previous installations have used.

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.