Where I’m @

20050627

Notes on Building Sakai on Windows

• When installing Tomcat, pay no attention to the fact that the installer asks if you want to start the service when finished installing. It will not start the service. Also pay no attention to the systray icon that appears after installation that indicates the service is running, as the service is not, in fact, running. To start the service you must either reboot (if you like rebooting and you have set the Tomcat service to start automatically on boot) or right-click the systray icon and select Start Service.
• When installing Maven, make sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set before running the installer, as the installer seems to not run without it.

posted by Tk at 12:14 • • sealed in amber

20050621

Deploying ASP.NET Applications
When deploying an ASP.NET web application, there is a situation that confused us very much and which we wish to clarify for others who might find themselves in a similar situation.

As we experienced it, the sequence of events is thus: The app is properly XCOPY deployed, but you see the error screen about changing the customErrors attribute mode value to off from RemoteOnly. You make that change, and nothing happens. You cycle the website through the IIS manager, nothing. You execute the iisreset command from a command line, nothing. You spend the next 20 minutes looking around online for solutions, and nobody has nothing. And now your stomach is getting tight because you’re supposed to be the one in the office with .NET experience and everyone is looking at you kinda funny. Until you find someone with an offhand mention of looking at the page/site from the host computer, and from there the error is that the directory cannot be found. So finally, you CACLS the entire site directory to add the ASPNET user, and things work just fine. Except that now you have to tell everyone that it was a simple permissions issue.

posted by Tk at 13:53 • • sealed in amber

20050610

Ending Dormancy?
We found in our PalmPilot some material for Overheard from 2003 that never got posted. Somewhat like crop rotation, it’s good to let projects like that lie fallow for a while. Now that we have rediscovered it, we hope to add more recent material as well. Our new surroundings are much less dense in population, especially during the summer months, so we have less opportunity to overhear and mock people. But we’ll give it the old college try.

posted by Tk at 12:30 • • sealed in amber

20050602

Reducing “Access Denied” Errors in MySQL
Always remember to execute FLUSH PRIVILEGES; when making changes to user passwords in MySQL via an UPDATE SQL statement.

posted by Tk at 14:50 • • sealed in amber