Installing LiveTime on Mac OS X Server

This is probably the most obscure post ever – but I need to put it up here, in case it helps someone, somewhere at some point.

I recently had a consulting job, where the client wanted a little help with a software installation of some ‘enterprise’ software at their office. (Quite why the business community have decided that their software needs to be labelled ‘enterprise’ still eludes me – it makes it sound like a naval vessel.)

Anyway – this business runs Mac OS X server (10.5) and needed to install a web app called LiveTime. LiveTime used to be a WebObjects application (the history of WebObjects is a fascinating topic – which I won’t go into here) but now is almost entirely Java-based and runs from an instance of the Apache Foundation‘s Tomcat application server. Apache are the fine, fine people who brought us the Apache web server, which is basically the back-bone of the Web: it serves the majority (apparently 70%) of web sites that you’ll ever visit (including this one.)

Mac OS X Server comes with Tomcat built-in – so I started by trying to deploy the web application through the built-in version of Tomcat (which seemed pretty up to date.) That didn’t go well and I got errors from Tomcat when I tried accessing the webapp along the lines of ‘Servlet WOServletAdaptor is not available.’

Googling this error message only lead to WebObjects developers on Apple’s WebObjects mailing list attempting to deploy applications that they had written themselves. Googling for ‘LiveTime’ and this error got one result, which wasn’t useful.

It’s quite telling how you can often solve open-source application install issues, simply by googling, yet with proprietary apps, you have to go through their own support systems due to lack of public information. I’m not saying that LiveTime’s support was bad – in fact I got (24 hours later) very good support from a very nice, very knowledgeable and very busy Aussie who walked me through the install process. I do wonder, however, how much more quickly the issue would have been resolved if I hadn’t had to call the vendor.

So, one of the first things that I learned from my support guy was that the supplied Tomcat install on Mac OS X server wasn’t quite right for their software. Once I’d installed a fresh copy in /usr/local/ (instead of the default Mac OS X Server /Library/Tomcat/ install) things went a lot more smoothly, although not entirely smoothly. Apache and Tomcat weren’t playing well together – The LiveTime application was serving most of the application correctly from Tomcat’s own webserver on port 8080, but Apache (on the normal port of 80) simply couldn’t get a proper connection to the Tomcat server via its Jakarta Connector.

At this point the support guy and I hit a wall and I spent the next day working though each part of the install trying to work out where we were going wrong. After a lot of hair-pulling I figured it out: it turns out that the bridge by which Apache and Tomcat were trying to communicate (mod_jk – the Jakarta module for Apache) could not get up and running because the port it was trying to use (8009) was already in use by Mac OS X Server’s iCal Server.

So – if you’re trying to install LiveTime on Mac OS X server note the following:

1 – don’t use the installed version of TomCat which comes with Mac OS X Server – install a fresh version in /usr/local or /opt/local
2 – don’t use the suggested port for the jk worker, pick another.

Using the 3COM OfficeConnect Wireless 11g Firewall Router with the BeThere ISP

I am currently using BeThere as my ISP. They are pretty good, you can get upto 24Meg DSL and there’s no port blocking, throttling or any of that non-sense, and they’re a reasonable price. Alas I only get just under 2 meg down (in central London!) and just under 1 meg up.

They give you a free router which is a re-branded Speedtouch box. It’s very flexible but only if you’re prepared to telnet into it and alter the config via the command-line. Mine served me pretty well, until the BBC brought out the iPlayer. It has a terrible habit of crashing when streaming flash audio or video from the BBC’s iPlayer. This was an irritation, but now that all video on BBC sites and BBC Radio’s ‘listen again’ use the same flash delivery system, it became untenable as a router. (I believe that BT’s Home Hub router is having similar issues at the moment.)

So I decided to move back to my ever-trusted previous router: a 3COM OfficeConnect. I bought it years ago – and although it was more expensive than your average bargain-bucket router it’s never failed me, is rock-solid and surprisingly even supports ADSL2+ (even though I bought it back in… the early 2000′s.) If you’re going to buy networking kit – 3COM isn’t a bad bet, they know what they’re doing.

Anyway – I had a little bit of a tough time getting it to work with BeThere (who don’t use PPPoA like most DSL providers in the UK) so I thought I’d document what I needed to do to get it working.

In order to get one working with BeThere you need to use the following settings:

Protocol: Dynamic/Fixed IP in 1483 Bridge Mode
IP address: (my static IP address)
Subnet Mask: (my subnet mask)
Default Gateway: (my Gateway address)
VPI/VCI: 0/101
Encapsulation: LLC
QoS Class: UBR (not sure if this is correct, but it’s the default)
PCR/SCR/MBS: 4000/4000/10 (again – the defaults)
DHCP Client – not checked.

If you don’t have a static IP, then you can probably leave the IP address/netmask/gateway empty and just check the DHCP checkbox.

If you do use a static IP then you can get the relevant addresses by calling BeThere customer support.

Oh, by the way – if like me, you have a static IP address and want one of your LAN machines to be the public face of your network (place it in what router manufacturers call a ‘DMZ’) then the OfficeConnect will gladly let you do this – but it simply won’t work unless you turn the firewall on. If the firewall is disabled then you won’t be able to connect to that machine from outside the LAN.