Running Dspace on Port 80
Dspace is a fairly complicated piece of software. There are a lot of knobs and buttons to tweak to get it going. My biggest pet peeve with it is that it natively works on the Tomcat default port 8088. That creates a very ugly URL that could create problems down the road. The neat thing to do would be to set it to port 80 (and port 443 for your secure traffic) the problem is that Tomcat needs to run as the dspace user who doesn't have admin privledges and can't use port numbers in the restricted range. To get around that you need to cook up some scripts that can be run as root that will start Dspace for you.
The first step, get familar with the JSVC utility.
You can then make a startup script similar to the following (assuming you are working out of the Tomcat install directory):
/usr/local/bin/jsvc \ -user $TOMCAT_USER \ -cp $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar \ -outfile $CATALINA_HOME/logs/catalina.out \ -errfile $CATALINA_HOME/logs/catalina.err \ -pidfile "$CATALINA_PID" \ \ -Djava.endorsed.dirs=$CATALINA_HOME/common/endorsed \ -Dcatalina.home="$CATALINA_HOME" \ -Djava.io.tmpdir="$CATALINA_TMPDIR" \ org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
During the process of setting up Dspace you should of had the opportunity to set the environment variables. Also modify the location of jsvc if you have installed it somewhere else. Run that script as root and things should work out. Be sure to change your configuration in server.xml in the tomcat config directory to use port 80 instead of 8088
The script to shutdown dspace looks like the following:
jsvc \ -user $TOMCAT_USER \ -cp $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar \ -pidfile "$CATALINA_PID" \ -stop \ org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap stop
This script takes a while to run but does the job. In the event that you need to force Dspace to stop working you can run 'ps' and kill the jsvc entries. 'killall jsvc' in otherwords.
w00t.
Further Reading:
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