Cricalix.Net

I’m doing some final tuning work on the Puppet recipes for our Glassfish installation, and Java has reared one of its ugly heads again. In this case, it’s the whole management of the command line arguments for the JVM.

The majority of the arguments we need to configure take the form
-D$variable=$value
-XX:$variable=$value

The problem is, Java also has arguments that look like
-X$variable$value

This means my nice simple recipe to deal with tweaking the Glassfish JVM options doesn’t actually handle all the cases, so I now need to either go write a more complex one (and imbue it with knowledge as to what variables don’t have equal signs), or write a second recipe with a different name to handle these special snowflake options.

Feh.

Doing more testing at work today, and decided to pickup the latest compiled output from the build server.

Exception occured in J2EEC Phasejava.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unknown ContainerTransaction type [Requires]
com.sun.enterprise.deployment.backend.IASDeploymentException: Error loading deployment descriptors for module [EJB FILE] — Unknown ContainerTransaction type [Requires]
at com.sun.enterprise.deployment.backend.Deployer.loadDescriptors(Deployer.java:390)

Pinged one of the developers about that, and apparently it means that the transaction-type in ejb-jar.xml is wrong.  Yay.  For a reason I cannot fathom, Google had no results for this error either.

I’ve been working with Glassfish recently, from the system administration point of view.  First task, after getting a good build with Maven (doing it with basic rpm methods netted me a massive dependency list, including things like Firefox!), was to write an init script so that Glassfish can be integrated into the CentOS boot sequence.

Because we might have multiple domains set up inside of Glassfish, I opted for a setup similar to the Tomcat5 init script – check the basename of $0, and use that to determine which domain to boot up.  The fiddling in start() gets around the fact that Glassfish doesn’t seem to write a PID file out where we need one.

So, just in case anyone else needs to do this:

#!/bin/bash
# chkconfig: 2345 85 15
# description: GlassFish is a Java Application Server.
# processname: glassfish
# pidfile: /var/run/glassfish.pid
 
# source function library
. /etc/init.d/functions
 
RETVAL=0
GLASSFISH_BIN="/var/lib/glassfish/bin"
 
# Basename works with symbolic links.
NAME="$(basename $0)"
unset ISBOOT
# Trim off the Sxx/Kxx prefix
if [ "${NAME:0:1}" = "S" -o "${NAME:0:1}" = "K" ]; then
    NAME="${NAME:3}"
    ISBOOT="1"
fi
# Trim off the glassfish- prefix
NAME=${NAME:10}
 
# /etc/init.d/glassfish should never be called directly.
if [ -z $NAME ]; then
        echo -n $"Cannot start Glassfish without specifying a domain."
        failure
        echo
        exit 1
fi
 
start() {
        echo -n $"Starting Glassfish V2 domain $NAME: "
        daemon --user glassfish --pidfile /var/run/glassfish-$NAME.pid "$GLASSFISH_BIN/asadmin start-domain $NAME >/dev/null 2>&1"
        RETVAL=$?
        if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
                PID=`ps U glassfish | grep $NAME | awk '{ print $1}'`
                echo $PID > /var/run/glassfish-$NAME.pid
                touch /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME
        fi
        echo
}
stop() {
        echo -n $"Shutting down Glassfish V2 domain $NAME: "
        $GLASSFISH_BIN/asadmin stop-domain $NAME >/dev/null 2>&1
        RETVAL=$?
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME && rm -f /var/run/glassfish-$NAME  && success || failure
        echo
}
 
case "$1" in
  start)
        start
        ;;
  stop)
        stop
        ;;
  restart|reload)
        stop
        start
        ;;
  condrestart)
        if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/glassfish-$NAME ]; then
            stop
            start
        fi
        ;;
  status)
        status glassfish-$NAME
        RETVAL=$?
        ;;
  *)
        echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|condrestart|status}"
        exit 1
esac
 
exit $RETVAL

The alternative is to define a /etc/sysconfig/glassfish file, and insert a variable with the list of domains to boot, in sequence.  This is a little harder to manage automatically in Puppet, but might be a better solution if precise boot sequences are required (this method will boot in sequence based on the S numbers in the base script, and then the alphabetical ordering of the names).