Installing & Running JBoss in Ubuntu

Being mostly a Java guy, a couple of my favorite servers to work with are Tomcat and JBoss. While at work, it has been exclusively Tomcat, lately, I've been mostly interested in working with JBoss. For a couple years, I've had JBoss installed on my Windows machine. It is pretty easy,just unzip on your hard drive and execute the run script in the bin directory.

Since I installed Ubuntu, I've wanted to switch to using Linux as my JBoss OS. With Ubuntu, I could easily use the update manager, or apt-get jboss, to get it installed. However, it wouldn't give me the version I wanted. So, I figured I'd work this manually.

The first thing I do, is download a zip. A common place to put the software is /usr/local. So, I will download, and unzip the package there.

cd /usr/local
sudo wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/jboss/files/JBoss/JBoss-6.0.0.Final/jboss-as-distribution-6.0.0.Final.zip
sudo unzip jboss-as-distribution-6.0.0.Final.zip

The funny thing is that I can't seem to find a tarball for JBoss, so I just get the zip. Based on this, and the directory structure of JBoss, it seems that the development of JBoss was mostly geared towards Windows based servers. Regardless, it works great on Linux as well.
Now, at this point, you can just run JBoss out of the box, using the run.sh script in th ebin directory.

sudo /usr/local/jboss-6.0.0.Final/bin/run.sh

This will start up the server, and the terminal window would be the standard output. It that is all you need, then you can stop right here. But in general, there are a couple things to simplify the start up and shut down process. I like to control the server as a service, from the /etc/init.d directory. Within the bin directory, there is a startup script which will call the run.sh script as the jboss user. The script is written with redhat in mind, but is easily modified to run with Ubuntu. But first, lets create a jboss user and grant ownership to the jboss directory.

sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -d /home/jboss -p jboss
sudo chown -R jboss:jboss /usr/local/jboss-6.0.0.Final/

The useradd command will create the jboss user, with the /home/jboss directory as it's home, and the default shell is bash. This command will create the jboss user without a password. If you are like me, and like to make things as secure as possible, use sudo passwd jboss to create a password for the jboss user.

sudo ln -s jboss-6.0.0.Final/ jboss. The chown command grants ownership to the jboss user. The -R, after the chown command, does a recursive call to the sub directories.
Now that the jboss user is set up, copy the jboss_init_redhat.sh file into the /ect/init.d directory, and name it jboss.

sudo cp jboss-6.0.0.Final/bin/jboss_init_redhat.sh /etc/init.d/jboss

There are a couple changes we need to make with the file. first, it assumes that the JBoss home directory is /usr/local/jboss. By default, our command to unzip the package created the home as jboss-6.0.0.Final/, so we can either rename the directory, with the mv command, change the init file to reflect the real path, or create a symbolic link. I prefer the symbolic link, because we can keep the old packages as we download more, and if we need to revert, it is just a matter of modifying the symlink.

sudo ln -s jboss-6.0.0.Final ./jboss

The next change is in the file itself. Use VI and modify the JAVAPTH variable to the correct path of your java command. In my case, and most likely yours as well, the path is /usr/local/bin. If you don't know the path, just use the command "which java". Verify some of your other variables, just in case you need to make changes for your system.

At this point, you are all set to run it as a service. Use the following commands to start, stop, and restart the server.

/etc/init.d/jboss start
/etc/init.d/jboss stop
/etc/init.d/jboss restart

If you created your jboss user with a password, you will need to supply the password. The server will start up and the logs will be written to /usr/local/jboss-6.0.0.Final/server/default/log/server.log. If you'd like to have the server start at system start, then you can update the rc.d to include it as an auto start up.

sudo update-rc.d jboss defaults

I personally prefer to start it up as needed. Once started, you can deploy your jars, wars, and ears as you normally would, in the deploy directory of the server you are using. In this case, we are using the default server.

Update 12/29: I updated this post to reflect the GA release of JBoss 6.0.

Ubuntu Wubi vs Grub Upgrade

Back in my younger days, I really loved tinkering around with Linux. I wouldn't consider myself a Linux expert, but I was learning, and gained a lot of experience. I stated out using Red Hat, before Fedora, and played around with Gentoo, PHLAK, and even built a firewall using Coyote Linux installed on a Floppy disk. It was a great learning experience, and I made sure I used a computer which I didn't need anymore.

Then, I had kids. All of my free time was taken up by the family. I needed to prioritize my life a little stricter, and family, personal health, job, and relationships took priority over Linux. So, for the following 5 years, I was a Windows user. My job didn't require any Unix or Linux work, and being a Java programmer (for the most part), it didn't matter what OS I used.

Last summer, I decided to get back into it. My kids are grown to the age where they can entertain themselves, and don't need constant supervision. So, I decided to check out Ubuntu. I've heard a lot of great things about Ubuntu. I went to their website, and was about to create a LiveCD when I noticed they have a Windows Installer.... huh? Whats this? An executable which installs Linux as a Dual Boot? No hard drive partitions? No figuring out swap size? The culprit is known as Wubi. after a download and a double click, I restarted. My computer started up with a Bootloader menu, displaying a selection for Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I selected Ubuntu and set it up. It was so easy. I almost felt ripped off. I mean, come on, my elitist Linux user attitude could no longer be expressed, since Ubuntu is as simple as Mac OS.

All was going well, for a couple weeks, I was in dual boot bliss. Until, one day, the Update Manager notified me that there was a new version of Grub. I refreshed my memory about what Grub was. Grub is a bootloader. Ok, I will update it.

Then it happened.... a problem with the typical Linux complexity. I rebooted, and in place of the nice bootloader menu, I got the following:

error: no such device: c73d2390-fb23-82c2-63823ae2eac2c
grub rescue>

What is this???? I quickly grab a second laptop and start up google. I search for "grub" and "ubuntu grub rescue". A lot of results are returned. After a while of sifting through the links, I find out that Grub and Wubi don't really play nice. In theory, Wubi has a bootloader which should send control to Grub. That is what was happening before the upgrade. The new version of Grub caused a conflict, such that Wubi didn't run, and Grub didn't know where it was. My initial google search was good for learning about the problem, but didn't yield much in terms of fixing the problem. So, I added "wubi" to the search terms, and I received a lot more results. Many of them told me to go here: "How to restore the Ubuntu/XP/Vista/7 bootloader (Updated for Ubuntu 10.10)". This seemed like the fix I was looking for. Only problem, it wasn't ment as a fix for Wubi installs. Wubi is a different beast all together.

More searching of the ubuntuforums site produced more insight about the problem, and how to ultimately fix it. The solution was to install lilo, another Windows bootloader, and don't ever update Grub. So, I made an Ubuntu LiveCD, and booted from it. That worked nicely and gave me access to a terminal. I then installed lilo, and added it to the mbr (the first sector of the primary hard drive):

sudo apt-get install lilo
sudo lilo -M /dev/sda mbr

After reloading.... It worked :-)
Other forum posts recommended to lock the Grub version in the updater. That is ok to do, but I decided I don't like Wubi anymore. But what can I do? I have a lot of customizations and software currently installed in my current Ubuntu install.

Well, it turns out that if I had only installed Ubuntu as its own partition from the beginning, this wouldn't have happened. But I did not give up hope, googleing "convert wubi install to partition". I found this post: "HOWTO: migrate wubi install to partition". Perfect, just what I needed. Basically, I have to free up some space on my hard drive, aka deallocate it, and create 2 partitions. One for the root /, and the other for the swap space. Windows 7 has an easy way to "shirnk" a partition, which will free up some space on a hard drive. I made the 2 partitions with 60G for root, and 6G for swap (I have 4G of RAM, so 6G sounded good).

Going through the manual steps outlined in the post worked like a charm. I rebooted and could use an updated Grub to load into Ubuntu or Windows. I booted into windows and used "Add/Remove Programs" to delete the Wubi install, since I no longer needed it. All is right in my Ubuntu world. The moral of the story is.... learn to use google.... and beware of Wubi. Wubi isn't bad, but it wasn't obvious that this would be a problem. After all of this.... my elitist Linux user attitude is restored (At least in front of my non-Linux friends).