Earlier today we (well, mostly Shane, really) upgraded our MARS installation—moving from 1.4.1 to 1.4.2. Admittedly a small version jump but when upgrading DSpace a simple(?) dot-point release is something you approach carefully.
The upgrade went smoothly and soon I hope to complete phase two (moving from the Apple default Tomcat/JBoss configuration to a Tomcat-only install). DSpace runs well with the default OS X Tomcat/JBoss tandem but there are at least two gotchas: 1) RSS feeds just don’t work in that environment and 2) Manakin will require Tomcat 5.5—not the 4.x version currently shipping with Mac OS X Server. While we’re not ready to move to a Manakin-driven interface, we want to keep it as an available option.
A few weeks ago I moved our staging/test server (another G5-based XServe) to a Tomcat-only installation and dropping JBoss out of the loop instantly brought the RSS feeds to life. It’s run fine for several weeks so today after we moved the DSpace codebase up to 1.4.2, I began the MacPorts installation of Tomcat 5.5.x on our production box. After installing and satisfying ten or so dependencies, my “tomcat” got stuck up in a tree. The macports install script keep trying to find antlr-2.7.6.tar.gz from a host of different sources and never could. I backed up and tried installing antlr separately but that too failed. Hmmm…
I sent DevonAgent off to find a solution and went to give a presentation on VuFind to our IT Projects group. When I returned, one of the pages DevonAgent turned up was uMac, the Mac Managers website at the University of Utah.
What a great resource.
Not only did I find a link that helped me figure out a quick way to get Tomcat 5.5 installed, I also found a great little QuickTime movie that covered the subject in wonderful detail. I haven’t explored the entire uMac site yet but what I’ve seen is just amazing. It immediately made my short list of great mac admin sites:
- afp548.com Changing the world one server at a time.
- MacFixit.com Troubleshooting solutions for the Macintosh.
- uMac Mac Managers at University of Utah
- macosxhints.com OS X tips and tricks
- barefeats.com Speed tests and benchmarking
- macenterprise.org OS X enterprise deployment project
MacPorts update: I finally figured out why antlr would not install via macports. The server where antlr-2.7.6.tar.gz resides has changed names (now www.antlr2.org) and there’s a typo in the portfile. To fix this, type “port file antlr” then go to the Portfile and modify the line pointing to www.antlr.org to go instead to www.antlr2.org (and remove the trailing slash).
iNODE update
Upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and while I was at it, added a plugin to WordPress that counts the number of times each blog post is read. The “views” number will now begin incrementing for each post with zero dating from September 24, 2007.