Updated: June 07 2008
For technical support:
The Tomcat VA is running Apache Tomcat 5.5.20 ( http://tomcat.apache.org ) using Sun Java 6 JDK.
The Tomcat Web Server Administration Tool and Web Application Manager web applications are pre-installed/configured. These applications can be removed by the end-user as necessary.
The default Tomcat username/password for the pre-installed webapps is admin/admin. It is recommended that this be changed either by editng the 'conf/tomcat-users.xml' file or using the Tomcat Web Server Administration Tool.
Due to the need for the JAVA_HOME environment being defined in /etc/default/tomcat5.5, if Ubuntu releases an update to the JDK, this variable will need to be adjusted accordingly.
This is only an issue if a Java JDK update is released and only if the VA is updated using 'aptitude upgrade' or 'apt-get upgrade'.
A Samba server shares the Tomcat 5 Server installation directory as "tomcat" using the standard SMB/CIFS protocol. This share can be disabled using the VA webadmin console (under "Configure Samba").
The default Samba user name/password is "admin/admin". It can be accessed by any capable Windows or SMB client using the following UNC path:
\\<IP address or host name of VA>\tomcat
or
\\<IP address or host name of VA>\shared
For example:
On Linux, using "smbclient", connect using the following command line:
$ smbclient //tomcat.local./tomcat -U admin admin
It is also possible to mount the CIFS filesystem (as the root user):
# mount -t cifs -o user=admin,pass=admin //tomcat.local./tomcat /mnt
In order for CIFS filesystem mounting to work in Linux, the smbfs package is required.
This share can be disabled using the VA Management Console (under Configure -> Samba).
For security purposes, it is strongly recommended to disable the Samba server once completed importing/changing files.
* URLs containing the host name "lamp.local." will only be accessible if the client has Multicast DNS or Bonjour (on Windows) installed. Please consult documentation below.
Because the Tomcat VA is built on top of Ubuntu, it has integrated package management. This allows the end-user to add applications as required.
In order to keep download sizes to a minimum, the APT repository in the Tomcat VA is uninitialized.
To initialize the APT repository, enter at the shell prompt:
apt-get update
To install all available updates:
apt-get upgrade
Note: The Tomcat VA has been customized using stock Ubuntu packages. It is possible that a yet-to-be-released software update can alter this customization and change the behaviour of the Tomcat VA.
To search for a package:
apt-get search package
To install a package:
apt-get install package
For more information, consult the Command-line package management with APT section of the Documentation for Ubuntu 7.04.
The default username/password is root/root.
Please change this password if using the Tomcat VA in a production environment.
The password can be changed using the passwd command from a shell prompt.
Note: As there is currently no Virtual Appliances Management Console interface for the SSH server, it is up to the user to manually disable the SSH daemon as necessary.
Multicast DNS, or mDNS, allows the Virtual Appliance to be referenced by the host name:
<hostname>.local.
All Virtual Appliances are mDNS aware. In order to make Windows & Linux clients mDNS aware, it is necessary to configure and/or enable the functionality.
Install the freely downloadable Bonjour for Windows package from Apple.
nss-mdns needs to be installed and configured. It is included in most current Linux distributions.
The default filesystem size for the Tomcat Virtual Appliance is 2GB, of which approximately 1GB is free for use.
It is now possible to add an additional virtual hard disk to the Tomcat VA to expand the database capacity. See "Additional Virtual Hard Disk" section below.
It is very easy to add additional storage to the Tomcat VA!
Simply create a second hard disk in VMware or XenServer and attach it to the Tomcat VA. The new VHD will be automatically detected, initialized, and existing data migrated from the first hard disk. This all occurs all without user interaction at boot-time.
Best Practice:
If the hosted web application(s) and/or MySQL databases are known to eventually grow larger than the free space in the boot hard disk, add a VHD to the Tomcat VA prior to first boot.
This alleviates the need for adding a VHD later and the downtime required to migrate existing data.
Please consult VMware Documentation or XenServer Product Family Support Documentation for more information on adding a second virtual hard disk.
These settings are no longer handled by the VAMC and must be configured manually. Please consult Ubuntu-specific Tomcat configuration found in /etc/default/tomcat5.55.
The default memory allocation for the Tomcat VA is 256MB. Please adjust accordingly depending on system load and database size(s).