ColdFusion 8.01 64-bit and Supported Linux Distros

The ColdFusion 8.01 System Requirements as shown in the detailed platform support matrix [PDF] indicates that support for 64-bit Linux distributions is limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10.1. This fine print appears to often go overlooked, so I just want to broadcast it a little louder here.

I was contacted today by someone reporting installation problems and mentioned glibc and floating point errors. A bit of Googling turned up this Google Group thread and this blog entry. Apparently, glibc 2.5 is required for the 64-bit binaries used in the ColdFusion 8.01 64-bit server, so RHEL4's glibc 2.4 just won't do.

On a related note, the ColdFusion Installation Support page currently has a broken link to receive free installation support by email. I notified the web team about the broken link, and I found that the new way to enter this type of installation support request is by registering your product and completing a form here.

  Ubuntu @ the Library -and- Vista SP1 Will Install XP

Jessamyn, a Flickr contact and the daughter of one of my friends at my photo club, recently posted a great video on YouTube about installing Ubuntu Linux. As a Librarian in Vermont, she was tasked with repurposing several computers donated to the library, each of which had a potentially unlicensed copy of Windows installed on it. Watch Jessamyn wipe the Windows off the computers, install Ubuntu Linux, and show how great Linux really is. She captured the whole procedure in this short and humorous video.

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  Linux Magazine on using Flex with PHP

In the August 2007 edition of Linux Magazine, the editor contributes an article about the usefulness of integrating PHP with the free Flex SDK to achieve a Rich Internet Application (RIA) in a Web 2.0 world.

Flex and PHP
by Martin Streicher
Linux Magazine (full article available online with free registration)

The author begins by a short comparison of the RIA technologies of AJAX vs. Flex, and goes on to suggest that while AJAX is touted as an alternative to Flex UI's, AJAX suffers from a lack of rich media integration such as video, music, or animations and carries the risk of varying JavaScript behavior across different browser implementations.

The article does a great job describing architectural differences between classic web applications and RIAs. In a multi-tiered Rich Internet Application the application server technology such as PHP, or better yet ColdFusion, acts as the controller to implement business logic and interacts with deeper service layers that interface with the database. However, on the client side, Flex runs in the browser to perform data input validation, displays data visually via drill-down charts and graphs or via paginated data grids, and provides real time updates to changes in data (via Live Cycle Data Services a.k.a. Flex Data Services).

Furthermore, Flex provides a smart looking user interface and seamless user experience akin to typical desktop software while lacking the notoriously painful white screens of death during page refreshes that are commonplace in the Web 1.0 world. In effect, more work is done in the browser as a means of distributed computing, leaving the application server to focus on business logic and freeing it from having to generate the UI again and again across requests.

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  Is there anyone behind the curtain at TurboLinux ?

Recently I tried to purchase the Japanese version of TurboLinux Server 10 but in the process ran into nothing but dead ends. TurboLinux is reported to be the most popular distribution in Asia and is based in Japan. Although their primary website is in Japanese at http://www.turbolinux.co.jp, they do have an English version available through a US website http://www.turbolinux.com.

The US website offers only English versions of TurboLinux, and their online store is simply a redirect to their US distributor BlueSquad. Additionally, Distrowatch indicates that the distributor Source One Network is leading vendor.

Finding that neither BlueSquad nor Source One offered the Japanese version of the product either online or by direct contact with their Sales, I decided to just call the mothership itself. That was a futile effort since the phone number listed for their US office in San Francisco is completely wrong. Three times I called to verify the number while pissing off who ever was picking up each time.

Great, so their phone number is misprinted. What next? Well, I sent a fax to their fax number requesting a call back, and I submitted their online feedback form. Twenty four hours later and no response from either.

What really irks me is that the US TurboLinux office is at 600 Townsend St and the Adobe (former Macromedia) office is 601 Townsend St. directly across the street!! But here I am in the Adobe office in Newton, MA and unless I could coerce a colleague in San Fran to take a short stroll I was out of luck.

Almost... My last resort was to co-opt my Japanese collegue down the hall to navigate the Japanese TurboLinux Website. With his help, we were able to successfully make a purchase after much wheel-spinning and wasted time.

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Now Available

Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5). The Server editions have changed from the AS or ES choices to RHEL or RHEL AP (Advanced Platform). Basic subscriptions for RHEL cost $349 whereas RHEL AP starts at $1499. RHEL now includes virtualization for running up to 4 guest OSes, and RHEL AP can run unlimited guest OSes (well, as much as your hardware can manage).

The Desktop edition Basic Subscription starts at $80, but there are several other Desktop configurations that include Multi-OS virtualization and Workstation ranging up to $339.

The free Red Hat clone CentOS released CentOS 5 Beta earlier this week, and they're expected to post the final version shortly.

  Running ColdFusion MX 7 on Fedora Core 6 Linux

There's been a lot of talk about how to run ColdFusion MX 7 on Ubuntu Linux, but I haven't seen much about running CFMX on Fedora Core 6 Linux. While both are officially unsupported for use with ColdFusion by Adobe, as a hobbyist you might enjoy working with these or other distributions, as I do. Ubuntu is based on source from Debian Linux, while Fedora Core is based on Red Hat source, and in fact Fedora distros are effectively public betas used towards the development of future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. According to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is by far the most popular distro out there, for now, while Fedora pulls in at #3.

The problems regarding the installation and configuration of ColdFusion on each distribution are both overlapping and yet distinct, especially where Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is involved (Fedora). FC6 intends to make SELinux security policy administration easier via a graphical troubleshooting tool. (While I was able to install and use setroubleshoot, I was not able to get the sealert client GUI to work, but it does have commandline operations that were helpful... somewhat. See below.)

Here I identify and address 5 problems in order to run ColdFusion on FC6, leaving one problem with SELinux unresolved but with a workaround. Some of these problems and their solutions have been blogged about before, but I found new twists to them in FC6.

I decided to address the issues of Fedora Core because Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is currently in Beta 2 and is largely based on Fedora, and I hope to be ahead of the curve by the time RHEL5 is released. Since ColdFusion 4.01 in 1998, ColdFusion releases have supported current Red Hat releases.

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  Saving costs in Linux environments while still using a stable server platform for ColdFusion

I began this as a comment to Matt Woodward's blog entry on ColdFusion start scripts on Ubuntu Linux. I just wanted to add some links, but it became lengthy and is better suited as a blog post of my own.

I'm not a Ubuntu user, but strictly Red Hat, Fedora, or Red Hat clones. I just wanted to post some related links for Red Hat users.

• System boot scripts for CFMX on JRun on Red Hat Linux
• The init scripts cfmx7search or coldfusionmx7 hang the system when booting linux

On the topic of running ColdFusion on "unsupported" Linux distributions, I recommend using Red Hat clones such as CentOS, rather than bleeding edge distributions if you absolutely cannot run a distro supported for use with ColdFusion by Adobe.

Fedora Core Linux, for example, is a bleeding edge distribution and is not appropriate as a production server even though it is sponsored by Red Hat. For a server you want stability with a well tested suite of packages rather than a distro that has all the bells and whistles but hasn't been put through its paces or tightened up as much the stable commercial release.

CentOS is built from the same source as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Effectively CentOS is RHEL, except that CentOS is free and supported by the community. This is possible because under the GPL, Red Hat must make its source available, and CentOS takes advantage of that. I'm not bashing Ubuntu or other distros here, but CentOS is a recommended stable OS that is appropriate as a production server, and I've had some Red Hat instructors tell me so off the record.

Since ColdFusion is QA'd on RHEL you can feel confident that a Red Hat clone will be as reliable as RHEL itself, even if that OS doesn't show up on the ColdFusion System Requirements. Still, however, should anyone using a clone need to seek ColdFusion Support from Adobe, you may be asked to first reproduce the problem on RHEL itself.

A good use of Red Hat clones for a small shop would be to use the clones for development and staging/QA of ColdFusion web applications, then host the final application on a paid RHEL server. This way you can save costs on non-production environments.

• Attack of the Red Hat clones
• RHEL Forks (and clones)

The same argument applies to clones of SuSe Linux Enterprise Server as well, although since I'm not a SuSe fan I can't name any of their clones.

  How to set up a home web server

Red Hat Magazine has a new article that describes how to set up a home webserver from scratch, including recommedations and advice on hardware, installation, security, and even how to deal with a changing IP address on your DSL connection.

How to set up a home web server
By Jefff Goldin

  A shortcut to getting started with PostgreSQL database on Linux

Recently I've needed to install the PostgreSQL 8.14 database server on a couple Linux machines for testing. Here is some information and scripts to make it easier for you start and stop the database, since installing from source instead of RPM leaves you without the convenient /etc/init.d boot scripts for Postgres and requires you to start Postgres database with the postmaster command when su'd as the postgres user. A bit of a headache... so I wrote the script shown further below as a convenience when managing Postgres and it may be helpful for those who don't want to read all the docs right away.

After having downloaded and uncompressed (tar -xvzf postgresql-8.1.4.tar.gz), the installation instructions begin with the a short version, to be run from inside the uncompressed source directory. I've modified the short version such that when creating the system postgres user account, no shell is given for the postgres user, then later a shell can be specified when using the su command to run the postmaster (The postmaster command can not be run by root directly).

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  Video Webcast from Red Hat on SELinux Concepts and Roadmap

In a Red Hat webcast, Dan Walsh, Principal Security Software Engineer for Red Hat, explains the high-level concepts of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). Learn about the design decisions that went into developing the different policies. Check out the differences between policies, and when and where to use them. See the future direction of SELinux within Red Hat solutions.

WEBCAST: SECURITY-ENHANCED LINUX CONCEPTS AND ROADMAP

  The init scripts cfmx7search or coldfusionmx7 hang the system when booting linux

Hans Omli recently presented the following problem to me:

I've run into an issue installing ColdFusion MX 7 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 2 or Update 3. The same issue doesn't occur on the original release of RHEL 4 or Update 1. The issue is that after restarting, linux pauses at 'Starting coldfusionmx7: ' until you press Enter, after which the boot process continues. Haven't been able to track down a workaround yet...

To be complete, the issue also appears on the original release and Update 1 of RHEL 4 after running up2date to apply available security updates. I think I've narrowed the issue down to the selinux-policy-targeted package. When I get a chance, I plan to diff selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-2.88 (RHEL4-U1) and selinux-policy-targeted-1.17.30-2.110 (RHEL4-U2) to figure out what change(s) may be causing the issue.

This was the fourth report I've heard of this problem, and until today I've never been able to reproduce it when using the original RHEL4 release. Hans provided the clue that it only occurred in recent updates to RHEL (or CentOS), so I downloaded CentOS 4.3 which has the updated SELINUX policy, and then installed ColdFusion 7.01 to let the fun begin.

The short answer and solution ...

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  Fastest Growing Tech Companies and the Rebounding IT Job Market

CNN Money published an article on the rebounding of the IT job market, citing the best places to live for jobs in IT, as well as which companies are growing the most and which skill sets are in demand.

Where the tech jobs are now
The IT job market is rebounding, but where you live matters.
Plus: Do you have the hottest skills?
By Anne Fisher, Fortune

To my surprise, Adobe was ranked 4th in hiring, although 91st in growth, and Red Hat ranked 2nd in growth, six percent higher than 3rd ranked Apple Computer.

  The Long Road to Red Hat Certified Engineer

In 1999 I purchased my first PC from a local trade show where small vendors built the PC according to a printed spec sheet where the consumer would check off components that would comprise the final product. It reminded me a lot of ordering sushi.

My friend Ken Sugino, a computational neuroscientist student at Brandeis University, encouraged me to install Linux on it. I had never heard very much of Linux back then, but since Ken and I ordered identical PCs, both lacking an operating system, he recommended we install Red Hat Linux 5. Thus began my fondness for the fine grained control over an operating system and its applications that I never before witnessed on any Windows 98 or Mac OS 7, 8, or 9 system.

I recall that the state of Linux was still pretty raw back then and out of the box support for new hardware was often lacking. For example, when Ken finished examining the motherboard spec sheet and tuned all the jumper switches to provide a custom hardware setup, we moved on to searching the web for a solution to overcome a problem where X would not start -- X is the windowing or graphical interface for Linux -- and soon we found an esoteric hack for the video card chipset settings that did the trick. Much of my early experience with Linux was like that. It was the Wild West of operating systems.

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  RHCE: Second time's the charm?

This week I'm attending the RH300 course at Red Hat, the "Rapid Track" course for the Red Hat Certified Engineer qualification, named by CertCities.com as The Hottest Certificate of 2006. The course has the recommended prerequisites of RH133 Linux System Administration and RH253 Networking and Security, and the only reason RH300 can be considered "Rapid Track" is that it is a review of the material covered in the two former classes.

Having had both prerequisties over the last five years plus having taken the RH300 course once before last year where I did not pass the six hour exam, I still feel that my head is ready to explode after the second day. The information is being received better this time, and is sinking in deeper, but still the volume of material is massive. My plan of attack includes having a RHEL4 test box and test network setup at home so that I can rush back from class to practice all the labs several times over on the nights leading up to Friday's exam. A misconception that I'd heard about the class is that during the performance based exam there are no man pages nor any documentation available. In fact, the instructor just today noted:

A good System Administrator is not defined by having things memorized but rather by being able to look things up in a reasonable amount of time.

While that's great for the real world, under the pressure and time constraint of the exam, my money is on having things memorized and well practiced.

Update: How did the 3rd time go?

  Stanton Finley's Fedora Core 5 Linux Installation Notes

If you're a Linux expert or novice you'll surely find this user's guide to installing and configuring Fedora Core 5 Linux useful. Stanton Finley provides carefully written step-by-step instructions and relevant reference material.

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