Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Debian package of .LRN

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Posted by Celio Guimaraes on
I would like to report a few minor problems with your beta debian package (which I could solve)
and a major one (for which I have no clue):
1. At the end of the installation when a dialog box  asks for setting  security settings for the database user in the postgres
pg_hba.conf configuration file the command:
su -  postgres -s /bin/sh -c "createlang plpgsql dotlrn"
fails because the dotlrn database was not created.
        I solved the problem issuing the command: su - postgres createdb dotlrn
2. In the same dialog box the command to "restart the .LRN  server with the following command    /etc/init.d/dotlrn  restart "
fails because there are a few errors in the /etc/init.d/dotlrn script :
the DAEMON variable is incorrect, it should be: DAEMON=/usr/sbin/aolserver4-nsd (instead of /usr/sbin/nsd);
the ADDRESS and PORT variables do not reflect previous user settings and remain at the standard localhost and 80 values
After these corrections the aolserver is started OK and the OpenACS browser based installation proceeds OK.

The unsolved problem:
At the end of the browser based OpenACS installation (when lots of database operations are performed)
and the "Installation finished" message is issued, the following message states that:
"The server has been shutdown. Normally  it should come back by itself.... etc":
the server is shutdown: true; but it does not come back by itself and no errors appear in the log.
After issuing the command  /etc/init.d/dotlrn  restart, a few aolserver process instances do appear in the process list
but the browser cannot connect to the aolserver so the last message that says
click here (here is http://127.0.0.1:8000/dotlrn) will lead to an error trying to access the aolserver
(I have run all the tests locally to make sure there was no network interference)

On the other hand, if  you start the standard aolserver issuing: /etc/init.d/aolserver4 start
the browser will  load the standard aolserver page: "Welcome to your New Home in Cyberspace"
Celio

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Posted by Otto Solares on
I'll fix 1. & 2. ASAP.

With the unsolved problem I must say that the OpenACS installer assumes people is using daemontools so when the installer shutdown the server it will come up automatically (which is a function of daemontools).  In the debian dotlrn package we don't use daemontools so I'll modify the installer to reflect the fact that people must manually start the server again.

/etc/init.d/aolserver4 is the init script from the aolserver4 package and may collide with the dotlrn one, I'll figure out a solution or warn the user about it.

I'll post a revised version today, thank you for the support.

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Posted by Celio Guimaraes on
Otto:
Have you posted the revised version?
Celio
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Posted by Otto Solares on
Yep.  I removed the old packages, the new dotlrn package is here:

deb http://home.galileo.edu/~solca/dotlrn/ binary/
deb-src http://home.galileo.edu/~solca/dotlrn/ source/

Please test it, report back _ANY_ problem.  I am pretty sure this one is almost _debian_repository_ quality.

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
Otto, would you mind posting how the packages are built?

Since Debian packages can be used for Debian and Fedora, we get very good coverage with these. If you could document how this is done, then we could move towards making this the default method of installation.

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Posted by Otto Solares on
You mean building from the source package or how to create a debian package (debianize)?

I simply build the package with:

cd source_dir
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

To build the package you need:

apt-get build-dep dotlrn
apt-get install build-essential fakeroot

The hard part is debianize the package which is better covered  somewhere in the debian's developer corner:

http://www.debian.org/devel/

Hope that helps.