[server-admins] Tomcat, JDK changes, development server, log file access (was: Re: mvnForums / tomcat )

[Jonathan Marsden]

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> First, it was the JDK which was hacked, not tomcat. The modified JDK
> classes are in a jar I created which resides at /opt/tomcat/endorses,
> which tells tomcat to use these classes instead of the default classes
> in the JDK.

> Second, SWORDWeb will currently only work with western character sets
> without this hack, so it really isn't a feasible test.  

OK.  Then I really would like an answer to:

>> Do we have a "development" or "staging" server instance somewhere to
>> test out such things?  If not, would having one be worth the time
>> investment in setting it up?  The main server seems to have plenty of
>> CPU/RAM/disk, so perhaps a virtual machine running on it could serve as
>> such a development machine?

if I am to look at this without first making a long term admin commitment.

I'll start creating a Fedora 12 virtual machine here, and see how far I
get, in the meantime, but I think a shared admin test resource would be
more valuable than one only I can use.

Meanwhile, /opt/tomcat/endorsed/ contains a single .jar file,
corba-utf8.jar, which contains a few compiled Java classes... is the
source code for these somewhere at hand, so I don't need to decompile
them in order to read them?  I may be fairly techie, and speak a good
few languages, but I don't speak or read Java bytecode :)

Since the current Tomcat server approach "works", maybe this isn't
really a priority issue for CrossWire, but as a long time admin, it bugs
me to see a server running like this!

>> Can you grant me just read access to the
>> (mail/exim/mailman) logs, for the moment?

>> Also, (assuming no radical changes to new software, e.g. I stick
>> with exim) what is the minimum length of a long term server admin
>> commitment -- three months?  six months?  a year?

Answers to these two questions would also be useful, when you have a chance.

Thanks,

Jonathan