Coldfusion MX 7 Fedora Core 3 - Installation Notes
Sorry for the poor state of these notes - didn't intend for anyone else to read them - but i'm aware this isn't the case now. I've tried to improve them as of 5th May 2005 - but please let me know if anything isn't clear. Please note these notes also work for Fedora Core 4 - we have moved away from Fedora on our development machines so although there is some documentation on this site about it I don't intend updating it.
Following a number of jobs recently I thought I'd put some notes together of methods I've used / discovered for dealing with Fedora Core 3.
In all cases I've started with a clean install of Fedora Core 3 on an i386 machine. I've now built and deployed eight machines in this way mainly for internal development use but some have been customer facing.
Our standard installation for Coldfusion development servers is:
Fedora Core 3
Coldfusion 7
PHP 5
MySQL 4
Webmin & VirtualMin (not covered here)
1) Installing Fedora Core 3
Standard installation (will provide full options on request). Installed as a webserver with the development libraries. I choose not to install MySQL at this stage as we have found it more useful to have features included in MySQL 4+. Make sure the SELinux is disabled - otherwise you will run into problems getting the apache connector to work.
2) Installing MySQL 4 & PHP5
Our preferred database is now MySQL 4 also we have had to use a number of features only found in PHP5 so we decided to make it part of our standard install. I'll cover the whole process of removing the existing MySQL and PHP and then carrying out the upgrade to MySQL 4 and PHP 5. [New page to be created here] in the meantime generic information is available here
3) Getting Coldfusion MX 7
If you have the CD you can mount and install it straight from this. Alternatively as we often can't find the CD you can download the trial or developer version from the Macromedia website. We chose to download the developer edition - these can both be upgraded later by updating the key in the Coldfusion Administrator. You should end up with
coldfusion-70-lin.bin file. There are more tasks to do so its easier to set this downloading on a seperate machine whilst you get the required rpms.
Before you attempt the install you will probably need to install the compat-libstdc++-8-3.3.4.2.i386.rpm otherwise you will run into problems with C+ related systems later - Verity serach, report generator etc.
You will also need the xorg rpms - included the depreciated libraries the ones you need are shown below. Without these the graphing service will fail to start - doesn't sound serious but completely stuffs the coldfusion administrator. I believe I've read a technote from Macromedia about this and think this should be fixed in 7.1. I found the easiest way to do the install was to call
yum -y install xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel
Yum will then go away and get the other pre-requisites for the install.
Required RPMS for graphing service
xorg-x11-font-utils-6.8.1-12
xorg-x11-xauth-6.8.1-12
xorg-x11-xfs-6.8.2-1.FC3.13
xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-1.FC3.13
xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel-6.8.2-1.FC3.13
xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL-6.8.1-12
xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-1.FC3.13
xorg-x11-devel-6.8.2-1.FC3.13
To actually install coldfusion you need to be logged in with superuser permissions. Chmod the bin file you have downloaded so that it is executable and then run
./coldfusion-70-lin.bin
The installation wizard will then start - the generic settings should work if you have carried out a standard install of everything. When you get to the webserver details make sure (if required) you add an apache webserver configuration otherwise the install will only work on port 8500.
4) Getting MySQL to work
To get Coldfusion to work with MySQL 4.1.9 you need to either go back to using old passwords or upgrade the jdbc connector for mysql. Further info can be found on this Macromedia technote the technote doesn't help you very much in getting the connector which I found here
5) Let us know this has been helpful
Although I seem to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get various things to work together I don't often fully document it. I've rewritten what was in effect a page of rough notes into this document following an email of questions from someone who found it through google. We'd appreciate knowing if you found this useful - or if you need some co-location space in the UK for your newly built server. Dave Gillard
Known Issues
Whilst spending the couple of weeks initially trying to get this work I deployed Coldfusion 7 onto a Fedora Core 3 box which was running CPanel. This appeared to work fine with CF7 running on all sites for a couple of weeks and then something failed. I'm not sure if the two were related but a server that had been running for 6 months with no issues became useless. It had been quite a struggle to get CF to install with CPanel so we haven't revisited this - but plan to do so in the future.
Development thoughts
Need to cover using sandbox settings and differing settings for different virtual sites on the same machine.
