Blogging Roller

During my recent re-installfest, I searched high and low for JK2 documentation. I could not find any "official" documentation on building JK2 for Debian, but I was able to fumble my way through by following the steps in a Debian mailing list post titled mod_jk and mod_jk2. I tried using the latest version of JK2, which is 2.0.4, but I could not get it to compile. I ended up using version 2.0.2. I'm using Debian testing, by the way.

Once I had built JK2, I followed the JK2 documentation on the Jakarta website. I was able to get JK2 working, but I kept getting intermittent HTTP 500 errors from the server. I started looking for alternative ways to configure JK2. I found some very helpful instructions at Greenfield Research titled Tomcat-Apache using JK2 Connector. I followed those instructions and I haven't seen a 500 since.

Why do I do it? Why do I have to re-install Linux every six months? Every time I do it, without fail, I find myself on my knees with my computer case open, swearing out load, and muttering "why the hell did I do this." I have the same problem with room re-arrangement. Every couple of months I find that I must, I simply must, rearrange some room in the house. I empty the bookcases, take everything off of every surface, and burn a day re-arranging and cleaning and putting everything back together again. Sometimes it works out for the best - I learn something cool about Linux or I find a better way to use the space in my house. Usually, it is just a waste of time.

My latest re-installfest was a classic example of this phenomenon. I had told myself and even mentioned to my wife that I wouldn't do it. I would resist the urge to install Gentoo Linux. I had too way to many things to do, but late one night in a moment of weak geekness I burned a Gentoo install CD and it was all downhill from there. It took me a week and a half to get back where I started: a Linux box with Apache hooked up to Tomcat via JK2, MySQL Roller, and Gallery. Along the way I installed Gentoo three times, took out memory modules then put them back in, moved my CD drive from one IDE controller to another, installed Debian unstable, unstalled Debian testing, and fought and won a bloody battle with JK2. I gained nothing! I think need a therapist.

I'm replacing Redhat 9 Linux with Gentoo 2004.0 Linux on my old AMD Athlon 1600+ box tonight. So far, the process has gone very smoothly.

Update: Around the time that I wrote "the process has gone very smoothly" my install suddenly took a bad turn. I am in the bootstrapping part of the install and, every time I run the bootstrap script, the build fails with a compiler, assembler, or loader crash. Each time, it fails in a slighly different part of the process; once in gettext and once in ncurses. One of the error messages indicated a hardware problem and the guys on the #gentoo IRC channel say the same thing. Perhaps I have some faulty memory./p>

Another update: Turns out, I did have a bad memory module and I forgot to properly configure my swap partition. I removed the bad module, configured my swap partition, and the bootstrap build proceded without a hitch.