Fedora Core 6

That happened to me today. I was updating the privileges for root and I ended up locking myself out of the database. Bravo! Luckily, I found a solution from the MySQL Web site. As the system’s (not MySQL server’s) root, in the terminal, do the following:


# service mysqld stop
# mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
# mysql -u root mysql


The above restarts MySQL without loading the privileges table. Once in the MySQL prompt, type in the following:


> UPDATE user SET password=PASSWORD("newpassword") WHERE user="root";
> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
> exit


This should change the server’s password. The change will be taken into effect, which you can test, the next time the server is restarted by issuing the following commands:


# service mysqld restart
# mysql -u root -pnewpassword


I found some instructions on the page below on how to change the Java runtime installed on a Fedora Core computer. I’m guessing the steps are similar for Fedora 7, Fedora Core 5, and maybe some more previous versions.

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.html#java

However, the runtime I needed for our server at work is the latest one by Sun, which is version 1.6.0. The instructions are a bit different in this case. After installing the RPM package, I had to do the following commands as “root”:


# sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jre1.6.0_02/bin/java 2
# echo 2 | sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java


Sometimes, Yum or RPM gets stuck when running. It may be caused by a corrupted RPM database. To fix it, do the following:


rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm --rebuilddb
yum clean all


More info:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=512804

After having installed ColdFusion MX 7 on our Fedora Core 6 server at work, there’s another slight problem: even though the server’s time zone information is up to date, the ColdFusion server still respects the old daylight time saving information, as it was before this year.

As Adobe wrote, this is caused by the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) powering ColdFusion. There’s a hotfix released by Sun. I had to extract the JAR file within the ZIP file into /opt/coldfusionmx7/runtime/jre/bin, stop the ColdFusion server, and run the following command:


./java -jar tzupdater.jar -u


I restarted the ColdFusion server, and the problem seems to be resolved.

Simple, if you want to disable the Verity search engine in ColdFusion MX 7 on Fedora Core 6 until the next time you restart, run this:


service cfmx7search stop


If you don’t want the indexing engine to start when the server boots up, run this:


chkconfig cfmx7search off


More info:
http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/thread.cfm/threadid:44374

I hate Java, but I guess that crap got enough attention to plague the computing world just enough so everybody is forced to install it. And don’t give me the crap about “cross-platform compatibility.” Install an JRE not by Sun and running all your JAR files will go haywire. As rudimentary PHP and Perl may seem to be compared to Java, its cross-platform compatibility is way superior than Java and C#.

Fedora Project Wiki: JavaFAQ

Official Fedora page about running Java on Fedora Core 6 and in Web browsers.

JPackage

Yum and APT repositories with free and proprietary Java RPM packages.

ColdFusion MX 7 on Fedora Core 6

I wrote about my adventure of the ColdFusion MX 7 server installation on Fedora Core 6. I have a few pointers about updating the server’s JRE. Useful for updating the time zones!

Where I work, our extranet is on an external dedicated server. Sometimes we have problems with it. Just sometimes, but enough to get all of us annoyed and let my boss decide to move our extranet on our in-house servers.

We have a Windows and a Linux box. Installation CD’s available are for ColdFusion 4.5, 6, and 7. Our external server is running ColdFusion MX 6.1 on Linux.

I first tried the setup CD for version 7 on our Windows box. The setup routine would get stuck at the Web connector installation step. The cancel button was unavailable, so I just terminated the process using the Task Manager. All the files were installed, so I ran the IIS_Connectors.bat file only to encounter the same problem.

I wanted to read about the problem directly from the server, but somehow Internet Explorer 7 stopped working. Instead of dealing with it, I simply accessed Mozilla’s FTP server via the command line, downloaded Firefox, and installed it. However, the search for information about the problem was all in vain. To make matters worst, the support and search areas of Adobe.com were down for maintenance. We then gave up on installing ColdFusion on Windows.

Time to try on Linux. The installation file on the CD was corrupted, so it was impossible to install from the CD or to copy the file to the hard drive and to run it from there.

Fine! Let’s try the version 6 CD. The installation worked. But when trying to start the ColdFusion server, the libc.so.6 is never found. After reading a page at IBM, I discovered that the CF local installation of the Java Runtime Engine was at fault.

OK… What next?

The “trial” version of software available on the Adobe Web site is actually full unmodified version of their software. If you have the serial number of your software, you can always download a recent copy of it from the Adobe Web site and install the full version using your serial number.

So, I uninstalled ColdFusion MX 6 and decided to install ColdFusion MX 7 on our Linux box. However, when trying to run the installation file, I still get an error message about libc.so.6 not being found! Obviously, with my little patience, it was starting to irritate me…

Luckily, someone by the name of Steven Erat encountered the exact same problem in the same environment. Kudos to him. With his guide, I was able to install ColdFusion successfully. I recommend you follow all of his instructions as close as you can. I promise you — it will save you a lot of time and head scratching at the end.

However, the ColdFusion HTTP server somehow got setup to listen on port 8501 instead of the default 8500. After doing a quick grep, I found out that the port number is indicated in two files in /opt/coldfusionmx7: uninstall/installvariables.properties and runtime/servers/coldfusion/SERVER-INF/jrun.xml. I just used a text editor to replace every instances of 8501 to 8500. After restarted the ColdFusion server using service coldfusionmx7 restart, the server was working fine on port 8500 as it should.

When it was time to access the ColdFusion Administrator and the configure the server, the login page wouldn’t take the password I’ve specified during the installation procedure. A bug, or maybe I just forgot what I wrote. Either way, no problem. I found instructions on how to change the password of both the server and the RDS.

The ColdFusion MX 7 server now works on Apache. I just needed to tweak the configuration a bit after having applied the Apache 2.2 hotfix for ColdFusion (as Steven described) and installed the Apache connector. By personal preference, I’ve moved the ColdFusion configuration in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to its own file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/coldfusion.conf. The Administrator was working fine, but the images were not loaded. I simply added the following line to the ColdFusion configuration in Apache and restarted the Web server:


# Below this line:

# Add the following:
Alias /CFIDE/ "/opt/coldfusionmx7/wwwroot/CFIDE/"

Apache is now working hand-in-hand with ColdFusion. The last thing to configure to work with ColdFusion was MySQL. I found a page on how to setup MySQL 4 for ColdFusion MX 7 (mirror) both on Windows and Linux. Our server has MySQL 5, but the same instructions applied.

Finally, everything works fine!