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Installing ColdFusion on Centos
I am gonna take some time to write about how bad my experience with AIT.com has been but for now I think its much more important to document the good things in life.
I finished successfully setting up ColdFusion MX 7 running on Centos 4.4 this morning. The server is running great. I actually had an incredible guide on this jouney as Steven Erat has done a breezo of installing CF on RHEL 4. For those who dont know, Centos is a recompilation of the linux source provided by a popular US linux distribution. So the setup on these to linux distributions is actually identical.
In Steven’s presentation he outlined all the pitfalls of the standard installation. Because I am running this on a dedicated server that is hosted remotely, I could not get the source from the DVD as his instructions mention. This is in response to fixing the “Graphing Service” error for systems not running an X interface. But because centos uses yum I was able to get the missing lib very easily.
yum install xorg-x11-deprecated-libs
After my install was complete I ran into a couple other small issues that took some time to sort out. The first of which as that starting ColdFusion took on average 350 seconds. This is not a sad server. I expected better. I was also not able to connect to cf when using wsconfig to set up apache. After a couple days of troubleshooting I did a search on the slow cf startup time problem and found this Adobe technote. To paraphrase the technote, the problem is that the name of the server was aliased to the public ip address of the machine. This was forcing local traffic through the firewall which blocked all but the essential ports. Once I made a small change in /etc/hosts to have the server name reference localhost, all my other issues went away. ColdFusion now starts up in under 10 seconds usually.
I just wanted to post my notes here in case somebody else runs into this in the future. Big thanks to Steven Erat for posting his guide for the installation.
17 Apr 2007 Simeon
Thanks Simeon–I actually just went through this last week. Guess I should have posted the steps for the benefits of others.
Glad you got that running–CF seems to run great on Cent.
Just last week I did two CF installs on CentOS 4.4 in two days and had the same graphing server issue. I almost blogged it myself, but I used Steven’s solution as well (yum rocks). I also had issues with the apache 2.0 connector not running properly and had to modify the connector script itself - it pointed to the wrong directories even though I had entered them properly when I installed CF.
A pain, but not difficult.
Thanks a lot!
I will also create installation instructions for Debian 4 for CFMX 8 and BD7.
I have already one for CFMX 7 and Debian 3.1 at following address.
http://howtoforge.com/coldfusion_installation_debian_sarge
I also would suggest to put a tutorial into HowtoForge site for CentOS installation.
I’m trying to install CF 7MX onto CentOS 5. I’m not having any luck with it. Everytime I run the binary I get several errors about "No such file or directory". Here is one line of the errors I’m getting:
awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I’m not sure what libraries are missing. Has anyone done this CF install on CentOS 5 yet?
Simeon, thanks for this blog post, I have a client with the same issue. When you say this:
"Once I made a small change in /etc/hosts to have the server name reference localhost"
Do you mean you added an entry to your hosts file like this:
127.0.0.1 servername
Hey Rob,
That is exactly what I mean. The host had the domain aliased to the external ip. So anything local was trying to go out and through the firewall to make its connections.
Obviously that was overkill and it broke lots of stuff for me
I wondered about the effect on the system, but the trade-off is fairly substantial. My client had an instance that took 1800 seconds to start yesterday. I am going to recommend they give this a try and see if it breaks anything important. Cheers!