I gave a small talk at a BoF at LISA entitled J2EE / Java System Administration. This talk was mostly intended for system administrators at LISA who have not had experience with running J2EE application servers and wanted to get some insights into how it is set up and administered. The talk was short and only offered a brief introduction with the JBoss Community Application server, but people seemed to find it useful, and the audience had some information to share and contribute their experience with running Java application servers.

I have posted a few links here for anyone interested in testing out a Java application server. The target audience is for those who have little or no experience with running J2EE application servers and how to get it set up.

The Elevator Pitch on Application Servers
Pre-requisites: Have Java installed on the host (JRE or JDK 1.5+ is recommended)

Step 1) Get the application server of choice (in this case the free, open-source version of JBoss AS) to install on their system from http://www.jboss.org/jbossas/downloads/
Step 2) Configure the ulimit settings and JAVA_OPTS to enable core dumps and remote management with Java Management Extensions (JMX).

NOTE: For the ulimit settings a ulimit of unlimited is recommended for the user account under which the application server will run. This is to enable core dumps and setting this to unlimited will eliminate the need to change this setting if heap size is adjusted.

Setting the JAVA_OPTS: http://gallemore.blogspot.com/2007/11/connecting-jconsole-to-jboss-jmx-server.html
What is JMX: http://blogs.sun.com/jmxetc/entry/what_is_jmx

Step 3) Unzip the jboss installation to it’s desired location and run bin/run.sh.
Step 4) Deploy an application that you created or downloaded from a trusted site. A simple Hello World web application was used as an example: http://www.centerkey.com/jboss/

Now the application server is running, and is ready for the deployment of Java web applications or web service applications to it. That’s it! You have configured a Java application server.

Troubleshooting the Application Server
Some utilities were showcase and introduced during the talk, and those links are available below. Gathering thread dumps was shown during the talk and the process is generally as follows:

Generate a thread dump
How to generate and capture Java stack traces: http://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-12300

Analyze the thread dump.
A tool called Samurai (written in Java) was used as an example: http://yusuke.homeip.net/samurai/en/index.html
Monitor the live application server via JMX using Jconsole. Jconsole part of the standard J2SE 1.5+ distribution: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/jconsole.html
I hope this BoF/Talk has whetted your appetite for Java, which is a rich, incredibly powerful programming language and application platform.

Matthew

At the “Meet The USENIX Board and Staff” birds of a feather (BoF) the wine was flowing, the company good, and the mood predominantly jovial. The USENIX board and staff were present to field questions about the conference and organization and listen to feedback from their members. A large field of questions and comments were specific to the conference itself, the history of USENIX, the board members’ responsibilities and amongst other topics.

Clem Cole, President of USENIX, fielded a question on the history of USENIX and its beginnings. He offered insights into how USENIX was started that there was a common nemesis called Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time, DEC was imposing licensing restrictions on programmers who wanted to port Unix to PDP computers. A group of programmers/system administrators came together to for the first Unix group called USENIX. Since that time, it has grown into the expansive organization it is today including training and fostering academic growth in the areas of computer science.

The details of USENIX’s beginnings are most interesting, considering it contains a great deal of how history has been made with the computer which we use today. The history of USENIX may be followed up with a separate article on the USENIX blog, so stay tuned in.

The responsibilities of the USENIX board still contain the original vision of uniting the computing community and fostering innovation that was present at its inception. Some of the more current responsibilities of the are to review and publish papers from the computer science academic community, and bring students to the conference who would otherwise not be able to afford to attend.

On the educational note – for students, system administrators, programmers and the curious, the training program has become an essential part of the USENIX organization’s efforts in providing excellent training, and is headed up by Mr. Dan Klein.  The people who created the technology we use on a daily basis often deliver the training at USENIX.

USENIX is also active in the standards community with an active representation on various standards committees from Nicholas M. Stoughton, Standards Liaison.

The USENIX board concluded that their responsibility is to deliver the best value to their members, and the best value is the conference content and efforts of the organization year round.