Java Reference
In-Depth Information
TIP
At this point we suggest using one more Linux filesystem trick. The tarball un-
packs into a directory whose name includes the product version—in this case,
jboss-3.2.3
. In many cases, you will want to be able to have more than one
version of JBoss installed on a box simultaneously, either because you need to
port projects from one version to another, or perhaps because you need to de-
velop applications that will run on different versions on different target servers.
To make your life easier, create a symbolic link to a generically named directory,
such as
jboss
, and have that symlink point to
jboss-3.2.3
. Then you can
write your startup and shutdown scripts to use the
jboss
pathname. You can
then switch to another version by changing where the symlink points:
$ cd /usr/local
$ ln -s jboss-3.2.3 jboss
This process is discussed in detail in Section 6.2 in the context of switching
between Java SDK versions.
20.5
T
HINGS
T
HAT
M
AKE
I
T
G
O
In order to explain how to integrate an Open Source application server into
your system, we have to do a little Linux Sysadmin training. We need to show
you how server processes are generally managed on Linux systems.
20.5.1
Virtually all Linux distributions use some variant of the System V init system
to create and customize programs and services that run at the startup of the
box. Now, we don't want to write a Linux system administration manual, but
we do need to tell you enough to decide how to make JBoss available when
needed on your server.
The core of the System V init system is the
/etc/inittab
file. Everything
else devolves from this configuration file. In the days before network services,
the primary startup tasks were to get
getty
programs running and then run a
single startup shell script. The
/etc/inittab
file handles these tasks beautiful-
ly. Since then, the world of UNIX and Linux has become a complex mixture
of client-server programs and protocols, so a complex set of conventions has
been developed to turn the primitive
/etc/inittab
into a much richer set of
System V Init System
