Learning the hard way

I'm a big proponent of learning by doing and that is primarily how I learn new things myself. It's like that old saying goes "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime." And with that in mind I decided to finally, and entirely way late in my career, get a Linux machine from viviotech.

CentOS

Now I'm not a complete Linux greenhorn, but I am definitely a CentOS virgin, so was surprised to find out that Java doesn't come installed on the OS by default. A little searching later introduced me to something called yum. Now I imagine "yum" stands for something in the CentOS world besides expressing something tasty, but for the life of me I haven't found what, nor have a looked too closely either.

Installing Java on CentOS

As I soon discovered installing Java is a piece of cake and consists of the following.

$ yum install java

That was of course after I first did it the hard way.

So why exactly did I want java on the machine in the first place? Well the goal here is to set up my very own Railo server. Yes I know that you can get a distro of Railo that comes with its own JRE.

so with java installed I proceeded with getting and installing Railo

Installing Railo on CentOS

I found a rather old install guide for installing Railo on a Linux machine and figured that it couldn't be that much difference between the install instructions for one Linux distro and another so I downloaded Railo using wget and followed the directions in unpacking it.

Since I wanted to also use Apache I also need to have the mod_caucho module which you need to build and compile for your specific Linux distribution, the document spoke of a precompiled version. I pinged Gert Franz and in about 15 minutes I had an email from Joachim Koenig with instructions on how to build and compile my very own mod_caucho module.

I compiled and installed the module, edited the hpttpd.conf file for Apache and added the bit that tells hands off the work from Apache to Resin and then started Resin up and Voila. A dsnless preview of an index.cfm page worked.

A little Problem however

So I learned a bit more about Linux, and got a little more comfortable again with typing in commands in the console window so that's a good thing. I got a neat little regular expression from the Railo Blog to set up Resin for dynamic Virtual Hosts. The only problem of course is the www.garyrgilbert.com and garyrgilbert.com are, with this particular regexp, two separate virtual hosts. I tried a number of different regular expressions without luck, and finally decided to do a rewrite rule in my .conf file to automatically send garyrgilbert.com to www.garyrgilbert.com.

The bigger issue comes when adding domains using the lxadmin console, I have yet to figure out how I am going to "automagically" add my virtual hosts in the resin.conf file because I really don't think that regular expression is going to do the trick. Until I figure something out I guess I am going to have to do it by hand, or do it the hard way.

Happy Coding...