10. March 2012

Tomcat 7 listen on port 80 – Linux Debian

The default installation of Tomcat 7 for Linux Debian is listening on port 8080.

When you want to change the port to 80 then you have several options.

You can use iptables and redirect communication from port 8080 to port 80.

iptables -t nat -P PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

The more straight forward approach is to bind Tomcat directly to port 80. First of all change port 8080 to 80 in file /etc/tomcat7/server.xml.

You’ll see error messages in /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.out when you try to restart Tomcat:

SEVERE: Failed to initialize connector [Connector[HTTP/1.1-80]]
org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to initialize component [Connector[HTTP/1.1-80]]
Caused by: java.net.BindException: Permission denied

The problem is that default installation of Tomcat 7 for Linux Debian allows to bind only ports higher than 1023. You need to allow binding to privileged ports.

Open file /etc/defaults/tomcat7 and change option from:

#AUTHBIND=no

to:

AUTHBIND=yes

Restart Tomcat and it will listen on port 80.

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , ) | 6 Comments

10. January 2012

Debian Tomcat 7 – the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty

I was deploying application on Tomcat7/OpenJDK. This application was accessing further secure services like SMTPS and HTTPS.

Tomcat was complaining that certificates are not correct (PKIX): the trustAnchors parameter must be non-empty.

Solution for Debian was quite easy after I found correct path to cacerts. Java cacerts for OpenJDK are stored in file: /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts.

To import certificate it is sufficient to use keytool:

keytool -import -keystore /etc/ssl/certs/java/cacerts -file cert.pem \
-alias ci.sinusgear.com

Then I restarted Tomcat and problem with trustAnchors disappeared.

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28. October 2011

Mutextrace – simple tool for detecting problems with mutexes

Debugging multithread apps is not easy task. Some problems never occur in debugging mode and it could be discovered only when application is running for long time. One of problematic issues in multithread apps are mutexes.

There is very simple tool in Debian distribution that could help you with identifying problems mutexes. The tools is mutextrace.

Quote from package description:

This tool displays mutexes locked and unlocked during execution of a program, and can provide hints for debugging multithreaded applications. As it is fairly lightweight and easy to use, it is ideal at the start of a debugging session or when only limited resources are available.

It cannot detect data races as it only looks at the synchronization primitives themselves; if you need that, use helgrind (in the valgrind package) instead.

How to use mutextrace? Like strace. Just add mutextrace before your application in the shell:

mutextrace ./mutex-tester-app param1 param2

Result:

lock #1, free -> thread 1
init #2
lock #2, free -> thread 1
unlock #1
lock #1, free -> thread 1
init #3
lock #3, free -> thread 1
unlock #1
unlock #3

Simple :-)

I couldn’t find reference to original source of mutextrace. It seems that it does not exist.

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7. September 2011

Debian – apt-get install perl problem

I wanted to install new package on Debian. But what a funny message:

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'perl-modules'. 
Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

How to solve it?

Type:

apt-get install perl -o APT::Immediate-Configure=0

Posted in Software engineering (Tags: , , , , ) | 5 Comments

9. April 2011

UNetbootin – quick way how to create bootable USB

Imagine situation: Boot procedure on Linux server is broken. You have SystemRescueCD, but CD-ROM is not working. You have notebook with Windows and USB key.

How to fix that server?

We can use USB key! :-)

It’s quite tricky to create bootable Linux key from Windows. It requires several steps… It’s hard.

No, it’s quite easy! Just download simple tool UNetbootin and create bootable USB in few steps.

UNetbootin provides several Linux distributions. My choice was ISO image of Debian Live, because it’s quite small and it has support for XFS and other useful stuff.

Note: SystemRescueCD 2.0 ISO is not booting correctly.

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