Article donated by: Hernan Cunico
This article is an attempt to cover as many administrative tasks as possible, common and not so common tasks. This article is grouped in four main sections having a similar flow to what you would find while using the Geronimo Administration Console, this way should be easier for you to familiarize on both tasks and console.
This article is organized in the following sections:
- #Administering the Apache Geronimo Server
- #Changing the Web container [Jetty or Tomcat]
- #Starting and stopping the server
- Configuring resources
- Configure log level
- Performance monitoring
- Adding new listeners for the Web containers
- Configuring the EJB server engine
- Configuring J2EE connectors
- CORBA/IIOP
- Configuring the UDDI server
- Configuring Services
- Adding files to the Geronimo repository
- Configuring database pools
- Configuring JMS
- Configuring JavaMail
- Administering applications
- Installing and removing applications
- Starting and stopping application modules
- Administering security
- Adding security realms
- Importing certificates
- Configure LDAP
- Configuring SSL
Administering the Apache Geronimo Server
Covered in this section are the most common, every day, server related administrative tasks you may deal with. Subsequent sections will focus on configuring services, managing applications and configuring security.
Changing the Web container [Jetty or Tomcat]
When you download and build Apache Geronimo from source code (from the trunk) you would get a directory structure similar to this one:
- applications
- assemblies
- configs
- docs_nopublish
- etc
- modules
- openejb
- plugins
- sandbox
- xdocs
If you look under the assemblies directory you will find the following subdirectories:
- j2ee-installer
- j2ee-jetty-server
- j2ee-tomcat-server
We will focus on the last two directories that, as you may expect, contain self-contained images of Apache Geronimo configured to use either of these two Web containers.
Depending on whether you want to use Jetty or Tomcat you will change to the respective directory (j2ee-jetty-server or j2ee-tomcat-server), the internal subdirectory structure will be the same. Once in the Web container specific directory, change directory once again to target/geronimo-1.0-SNAPSHOT. This directory is your self-contained, totally complete, Apache Geronimo server. You may copy this directory to a different location. This directory is being referenced as <geronimo_home> throughout these series of articles.
So, selecting the Web container is no longer a matter of changing configuration files but rather choosing a directory structure for the different assemblies. Within this structure you will find a /bin directory, the next section explains the commands located in this directory and how to start and stop the server.
Starting and stopping the server
There are two command line ways to start the server. From a command line window or terminal change directory to <geronimo_home>/bin. From there you can either type:
java -jar server.jar
or simply
startup
Refer to the Startup section for all the options for this command.
To stop the server you will have to open a new command line window or terminal, change directory to <geronimo_home>/bin and run the shutdown
command. You will be prompted for username and password. Refer to the Shutdown section for all the options for this command.
If the server is already running you have the option of using the Geronimo Administration Console to shutdown the server remotely. With the server up and running open a Web browser and point to the following URL to access the console:
Log in to the Geronimo Administration Console and click on
Shutdown on the Console Navigation panel on the left.
When you click on the Shutdown button in the Server Manager portlet, you will be prompted one more time to confirm the server shutdown. Click OK to confirm and shutdown the server. No need to mention that the connection from the Administration Console will be lost and you will need to restart the server from a terminal or command line window.
Configuring resources
for example Database
Configure log level
As explained in the Geronimo Administration Console section, the Administration Console provides four portlets for configuring and viewing the server's logs, these portlets are the Log Manager, Server Log Viewer, Derby Log Viewer and Web Access Log Viewer.
Log Manager
The Log Manager portlet options are depicted in the following figure. From this portlet you can specify the location of the log configuration file. By default this value is set to var/log/server-log4j.properties
.
Other value you can modify in from this portlet is the Refresh Period. This value tells Geronimo how often (in seconds) it should check for any changes to the configuration file. By default this value is set to 60 seconds.
From this portlet you can also change the Log Level. By default this value is set to INFO, the possible values you can choose from are All, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL, TRACE and OFF.
Log Server Viewer
The Log Server Viewer portlet options are illustrated in the following figure. From this portlet you can view the Geronimo server logs as well as set filters for refining the results displayed.
The Reset link on the upper left corner will reset any filtering criteria you may have specified to the Geronimo Administration Console's defaults and will display the last 11 lines (if any) of the current server log.
The Filter Results: area will let you specify different filtering criteria for narrowing down your search. The File pull-down menu allows you to select the log file to view. Lines ..to.. lets you specify a range of line of log to analyze. Max Results limits the number of lines to be displayed. Level displays only those errors occurred for that Log Level. Containing text lets you enter a specific string to search through the server log. With Exceptions by clicking this checkbox will be displayed not just the error but also the exception, the stack trace display will be limited to the number lines set by the Max Results value.
Performance monitoring
Adding new listeners for the Web containers
Configuring the EJB server engine
Configuring J2EE connectors
CORBA/IIOP
Configuring the UDDI server
Configuring Services
Adding files to the Geronimo repository
Configuring database pools
Configuring JMS
Connection factories, queues, topics and destinations.
Configuring JavaMail
Administering applications
Installing and removing applications
include hot deployment and redeployment