Installing Railo 3 on SUSE 10 with Apache2 and Tomcat: Part 1

Earlier this week I mentioned that I had successfully installed Railo on a SUSE 10 Enterprise virtual machine. I had also said that I would provide a step-by-step guide on how you can achieve the same. Hopefully this guide will help you set up your instance a heck of a lot faster than it took me to set up mine.

Getting Started

The first thing I did was download the pre-configured virtual SUSE 10 Appliance from the vmware Marketplace. The only problem with the Appliance is that it's pretty "bare bones". Unpack the zip file in your Virtual Machines directory or set up a new Datastore and import that VM.

Setting up SUSE

Start up your VM. You will probably notice that your VM never gets assigned an IP address, that's because the install is so basic it doesn't include a network card. You will have to go through the VMware Remote Console and set up a Network card before you can continue using more traditional means like Putty.

Setting up a Network Card

Once Gnome desktop is up you can click on the Computer symbol and start the Yast Control Center. Click on Network Devices>Network Card and use the "Traditional Method". Follow the directions provided and configure the network card. Once this step is completed start up a Gnome terminal instance and type "ifconfig" at the command prompt. You should now see an entry for eth1 (or eth0). Looking back at the VMware Intrastructure Web Access page you should now see the same IP on the Summary tab. You are good to go with the more traditional method using Putty, so go ahead and log off and close the memory hog of a remote panel!

Setting up the Install Source

Using putty connect using user:root and pw:root. The next thing you need to do is start the YAST control center. Once the control center is up and running you will need to set up an Installation Source that will allow you to install all the bits and pieces that don't come installed by default on the appliance. Add a new source of type FTP, for the server name you can add ftp.sunet.se, the full directory path is then "pub/Linux/distributions/opensuse/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/suse" leave the anonymous Authentication checked and then Alt+O to accept. It will take a while to add the catalog since it's doing it over the Internet. Once the catalog is added then Alt+F to finish (which also seem to take a while).

Installing Apache2 and Mod_JK

Still in Yast head over to Software Management and search for Apache and add the following modules:

• apache2
• apache2-devel
• apache2-mod_jk

Once you have selected the above modules Alt+A to accept, then Alt+O to accept the dependencies. Yast will then install all the goodies for you and set up the configuration files.

Download and Install Tomcat

Before you can install Tomcat you need to have the Java JDK installed download the self extracting bin file from sun's site. Change to the directory where you downloaded the bin file and make it executable. run the file Once the installation is complete there should be a directory called jdk1.6.0_12, move this directory to the usr directory

Now we have the Java JDK on the machine we need to get Tomcat.

Move Tomcat Create a startup script for tomcat by using the following command: Then past the following: Make sure you give the script execute permissions and then give it a go.

Ok that's it for now, The next step will be to install Railo into Tomcat and connect Tomcat to Apache via Mod_jk