Apache, Railo & mySQL Troubles after Upgrading to Snow Leopard

Odd. The upgrade to snow leopard just killed by Apache Resin Connector and the vhost config - that should not happen (read other reports here). So make sure you backup your vhost configs before upgrading. For the connector, I had to re-download XCode in order to build the connector ... (700 MB in total, take care!).

The mySQL server wasn't starting as well, a symbolic link seems to be broken after the update, see here. Furthermore, some programs like Cyberduck (SSH) and Nambu (twitter) aren't working any more. To be honest, a quite disapointing update so far.

Setup Mac OS X + Apache + Railo

A fews days ago I upgraded to a Macbook Pro and I already spent almost two days on reinstalling software, copying documents etc etc (An upgrade is an opportunity for me to get rid of old software and ballast).

Today I started with the Apache / railo setup using a guide by Luid Majano (I had to download the Apple XCode Setup file (almost 1 GB) in order to compile the connector for Apache and reset the httpd to 32 bit instead of 64 bit).

Further problems I had to solve:

• Read how to fix the "Apache Error: Client denied by server configuration" error (very restrictive configuration makes sense on real life systems but on dev systems ...?)

• I wasn't able to access my files until I executed a chmod a+x on every directory in the path to the webroot (apache log [error] [client ::1] (13)Permission denied:)

Now it's working like a charm.

Not all CGI variables show up using CFDUMP

CGI variables must be something special - it is not possible to show all cgi variables when doing a cfdump. I just came across this bug when trying to use a custom #404 page where apache provides the original page URL in the CGI variable REDIRECT_URL.
I am just using CGI.REDIRECT_URL now and it works.
The interesting thing is that StructKeyExists(CGI, blabla) does not work at all - the check will always return true.

Apache: Disable HostNameLookups

After an upgrade to our infrastructure (see a picture here), the delivery of content through apache was incredible slowly - the reason was that we moved our DNS servers to an external location and had no internal server for this task any more.
After some research we found out that disabling the host name lookup (HostNameLookups = Off) helped to speed up the pages delivery. Now our analyzer will perform the lookup task and we're happy again ;-)

ColdFusion / MacOS 10.5 / WebConnector: Not again!!

Every update of apache is a real pain for me and maybe most of the ColdFusion community. Each time the server engine is updated, the WebConnector has to be updated as well. In the current case, I decided to update my Mac OS finally to Leopard (10.5) and - bingo - with the apache update from 1.3 to 2.2 the whole connector stuff isn't working any more.
One solution might have been again to download the whole connector sources (XCode) and compile the connector myself - some hours work plus about 1-2 GB downloads for an about 90kb file.
The other solution: Follow these instructions and download the file offered for download.

ColdFusion 8 / Apache 2.2.3

I recently set up a new testing server using the latest debian etch release. During the setup, apache 2.2.3 has been installed as default webserver and to make ColdFusion 8 (and maybe 7) running with this release, the following steps are necessary:

• Install CF8 using the built-in webserver
  
• Open /etc/init.d/apache2 with vi
• Note the paths set by APACHE2 / APACHE2CTL
• Now execute the following command:

• /opt/coldfusion8/runtime/bin/wsconfig -server coldfusion -ws Apache -bin /usr/sbin/apache2 -script /usr/sbin/apache2ctl -dir /etc/apache2/ -v
• bin = APACHE2 variable
• script = APACHE2CTL variable
• Open the httpd.conf and add AddHandler jrun-handler .cfm .cfc .cfswf.jsp .jws to the last line (.cfm / .cfc might be missing). Found this solution here.

Done!