Multiuser setup instructions

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schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

I'm trying to follow the Multi-User setup instructions. I'm at the point where I'm supposed to configure the Protege Server Project. I've copied over the Metamodel.pprj files

but when I go to open the, to connect the Essentials projct to the Protege project there is NO PROJECT TYPE under the Managed Objects setting....
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

I think this is the same as this post.

The Project class is found in the PolicyControlledObject class.

Hope this helps

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

So there was a completely different problem than expected.

On Windows Protege expects the server to be installed in "c:\program files\protege_3.4.xxx"

on Windows Client software this fixes up correctly everywhere in 32bit mode. But the recent versions of Windows Server OS are all 64bit versions. And they place all 32 bit applications in "c:\program files (x860\ by default. And since Protege hasn't been notified by the install program that it is being installed elsewhere, not all of the paths inside the Server.bat file get properly fixed up.

Enough of them still work that the error ends up looking like an access rights issue with the firewall.


Note, I'm now having a different/possibly similar problem with the Essential's Viewer.

I followed the install instructions for MultiUser, and I now have a database, but I don't have a running Reporting Service.

and the Essentials Instructions say to run the Essentials Update JAR to install the Viewer Service. No such JAR gets downloaded with the current version of the install.

Furthermore any attempt to download the most recent "update" on the downloads page results in an error

Fatal error - attempt to access unpublished file by non-admin user

Note also - the trouble shooting section suggests downloading The "essential_metamodel-1.2.zip and

"After installation, if Essential Viewer is not responding or the Report Service is not responding, check that the essential_viewer.war has been extracted and deployed to your web application server (e.g. Apache Tomcat) webapps folder. If the WAR file does not extract when you restart Apache Tomcat, you can deploy the WAR using the Tomcat Manager."

Except there is no "essential_viewer.war" file that comes down in either the JAR file or the zip file.
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jonathan.carter
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Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks very much for posting back about this - it's really important to hear about the 64-bit Windows and the how the C:\Program Files x860\ folder.

We will put some notes in the install guides about this.

In terms of the Essential Viewer install, it may well be impacted in the same way but we found that the additional access control policies to the Program Files folder in Windows causes a number of problems, too. These are normally resolved by right-clicking on the relevant folders / programs to run them as administrator.

Let's start by ensuring that you have got Essential Viewer installed. This is included in the standard Essential Architecture Manager installer (essentialinstall.jar), as one of the 4 optional packages in the installer. Go to step 7 of the install guide and when running the installer, ensure that the 'Viewer' checkbox is selected. If you have not already installed Essential Viewer, you can run the installer again and just select the 'Viewer' package.

This part of the installer will ask you to tell it where the Essential Viewer WAR package should be installed. If you are using the Tomcat, this will be <YOUR TOMCAT INSTALL DIRECTORY>/webapps

The installer runs in Privileged mode, so should be able to write to C:\Program Files x860\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat x.x.x\. If not, be sure to right-click on the installer JAR and run it as Administrator.

The Essential Update installer only completes successfully if you have already installed Essential Viewer. It only updates some of the Viewer components and does not perform a full install.

The FATAL ERROR message looks like a Window access control error and should be able to be resolved by running the installer as an Administrator, as I've mentioned above and as documented in the Troubleshooting section of the install guide.

Note that the related articles at the bottom of the page do not relate to Troubleshooting but to installation - I can't recall any troubleshooting with Essential Viewer suggesting an upgrade of the meta model.

You've checked your Tomcat Webapps folder and not found the essential_viewer.war file, which tells me that you have not installed Essential Viewer. Re-run the 'essentialinstall.jar' installer and when asked, select only the 'Viewer' package (see above) and Steps 7 and 8 of the install guide. Note that as you'll only be installing View, the panel at Step 8 of this guide (which if Step 5 of the installer!) will only ask for the Tomcat webapps folder and not the Protege install folder.

The installer will copy essential_viewer.war into your Webapps folder. Once you've confirmed that this file is there and Tomcat has deployed this WAR file to create a new folder in <TOMCAT>/webapps, called 'essential_viewer' Essential Viewer will respond to the documented URLs. When you have confirmed that it is running correctly, then you can use the Essential Viewer Update installer to deploy some updates to Viewer.

Start by re-installing just the Viewer and let's take it from there.
Let me know how you get on

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks very much for posting back about this - it's really important to hear about the 64-bit Windows and the how the C:\Program Files x860\ folder.

We will put some notes in the install guides about this.

In terms of the Essential Viewer install, it may well be impacted in the same way but we found that the additional access control policies to the Program Files folder in Windows causes a number of problems, too. These are normally resolved by right-clicking on the relevant folders / programs to run them as administrator.

Let's start by ensuring that you have got Essential Viewer installed. This is included in the standard Essential Architecture Manager installer (essentialinstall.jar), as one of the 4 optional packages in the installer. Go to step 7 of the install guide and when running the installer, ensure that the 'Viewer' checkbox is selected. If you have not already installed Essential Viewer, you can run the installer again and just select the 'Viewer' package.

This part of the installer will ask you to tell it where the Essential Viewer WAR package should be installed. If you are using the Tomcat, this will be <YOUR TOMCAT INSTALL DIRECTORY>/webapps

The installer runs in Privileged mode, so should be able to write to C:\Program Files x860\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat x.x.x\. If not, be sure to right-click on the installer JAR and run it as Administrator.

The Essential Update installer only completes successfully if you have already installed Essential Viewer. It only updates some of the Viewer components and does not perform a full install.

The FATAL ERROR message looks like a Window access control error and should be able to be resolved by running the installer as an Administrator, as I've mentioned above and as documented in the Troubleshooting section of the install guide.

Note that the related articles at the bottom of the page do not relate to Troubleshooting but to installation - I can't recall any troubleshooting with Essential Viewer suggesting an upgrade of the meta model.

You've checked your Tomcat Webapps folder and not found the essential_viewer.war file, which tells me that you have not installed Essential Viewer. Re-run the 'essentialinstall.jar' installer and when asked, select only the 'Viewer' package (see above) and Steps 7 and 8 of the install guide. Note that as you'll only be installing View, the panel at Step 8 of this guide (which if Step 5 of the installer!) will only ask for the Tomcat webapps folder and not the Protege install folder.

The installer will copy essential_viewer.war into your Webapps folder. Once you've confirmed that this file is there and Tomcat has deployed this WAR file to create a new folder in <TOMCAT>/webapps, called 'essential_viewer' Essential Viewer will respond to the documented URLs. When you have confirmed that it is running correctly, then you can use the Essential Viewer Update installer to deploy some updates to Viewer.

Start by re-installing just the Viewer and let's take it from there.
Let me know how you get on

Jonathan


Well when I installed, I used the automated installer and requested that everything be installed. And I tried re-installing using the JAR file and no viewer got installed.

Since I posted the above, I have actually manually downloaded an older version of the .WAR file and manually deployed it within TomCat. It comes up, and the default reports are there, but I still cannot publish to the Reporting facility

Tomcat is running as a "service" under the Administrator account. The Protege server ALSO gets launched using "right Click - Run as Administrator". So I'm not sure where I'm off the rails


Note also I was unable to directly download the .JAR file to the Server. So what I ended up doing is manually copying it from my workstation to the server and then running it there. Cannot remember if I ran it "as administrator" the first time, but I did try that subsequently and it still did not work right
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks very much for posting back about this - it's really important to hear about the 64-bit Windows and the how the C:\Program Files x860\ folder.

We will put some notes in the install guides about this.

In terms of the Essential Viewer install, it may well be impacted in the same way but we found that the additional access control policies to the Program Files folder in Windows causes a number of problems, too. These are normally resolved by right-clicking on the relevant folders / programs to run them as administrator.

Let's start by ensuring that you have got Essential Viewer installed. This is included in the standard Essential Architecture Manager installer (essentialinstall.jar), as one of the 4 optional packages in the installer. Go to step 7 of the install guide and when running the installer, ensure that the 'Viewer' checkbox is selected. If you have not already installed Essential Viewer, you can run the installer again and just select the 'Viewer' package.

This part of the installer will ask you to tell it where the Essential Viewer WAR package should be installed. If you are using the Tomcat, this will be <YOUR TOMCAT INSTALL DIRECTORY>/webapps

The installer runs in Privileged mode, so should be able to write to C:\Program Files x860\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat x.x.x\. If not, be sure to right-click on the installer JAR and run it as Administrator.

The Essential Update installer only completes successfully if you have already installed Essential Viewer. It only updates some of the Viewer components and does not perform a full install.

The FATAL ERROR message looks like a Window access control error and should be able to be resolved by running the installer as an Administrator, as I've mentioned above and as documented in the Troubleshooting section of the install guide.

Note that the related articles at the bottom of the page do not relate to Troubleshooting but to installation - I can't recall any troubleshooting with Essential Viewer suggesting an upgrade of the meta model.

You've checked your Tomcat Webapps folder and not found the essential_viewer.war file, which tells me that you have not installed Essential Viewer. Re-run the 'essentialinstall.jar' installer and when asked, select only the 'Viewer' package (see above) and Steps 7 and 8 of the install guide. Note that as you'll only be installing View, the panel at Step 8 of this guide (which if Step 5 of the installer!) will only ask for the Tomcat webapps folder and not the Protege install folder.

The installer will copy essential_viewer.war into your Webapps folder. Once you've confirmed that this file is there and Tomcat has deployed this WAR file to create a new folder in <TOMCAT>/webapps, called 'essential_viewer' Essential Viewer will respond to the documented URLs. When you have confirmed that it is running correctly, then you can use the Essential Viewer Update installer to deploy some updates to Viewer.

Start by re-installing just the Viewer and let's take it from there.
Let me know how you get on

Jonathan
Ok just to make sure I reran the Essential JAR file. I ran it logged in as Admin for the Windows 2008 server

Note there is no way to launch the JAR as "Run as Administrator" since what it does is invoke the Java Runtime Binary, which I cannot launch independently of the JAR file. But running as Administrator with full Admin priviledges should have done what is necessary.

Note that on a Windows 2008 Server, this DID NOT DEPLOY the essential_viewer.war.

but since I have already deployed that previously I do have the Essential Viewer up and running as a TOMCAT app

It DID install a "server" directory where I pointed it to, but I cannot tell if it installed the Widgets stuff. (How do I tell)???



More importantly the error described above STILL re-occurs when trying to publish the repository to the viewer

So is there a manual way that I can publish the repository to the viewer?

As I said, I can see the viewer and generate Technology reports. But they are against some perviously installed snapshot of the repository So if I can do a manual replacement of that, this will serve my needs in the short run.



On a side note - I realize that moderating the community is a side task for you. But to some extent, the necessity for every post to be moderated before it is published dramatically reduces the "community" nature of the support.

And it in essence makes the cycle time for any communications on the order of 3 working days. Which essentially works out to be about 1.5 interactions per week. Which is really impractical when you run into issues like this one. As you know I've been trying to get these config issues resolved for upwards of 3 weeks now. And its giving me a very jaundiced view of "community supported" software. Say what you will about the impersonality of big vendors like Google or Microsoft, but at least their community response time (much less their "for pay" support) is much faster
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jonathan.carter
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I'm going to answer the last point first.

Every post is not moderated. Once you have successfully posted a number of times (you should now have passed that milestone), your posts will not need to be moderated. However, some of the spam that we've had posted on here is sufficiently nasty that we have to do this - we don't want to put any of our user community in a position whereby innocently browsing the forums results in them being confronted with material that could lead to disciplinary action by their employers. That we have to deal with such spam is a sad fact of life but we've reluctantly had to take this moderation approach.

In terms of support response, free support is provided on a best-efforts basis, as we've published throughout our website and in common with most free, open-source software. Few organisations have the luxury of the resources that Microsoft and Google can bring to bear on free support, so I don't think that's really a fair comparison but I appreciate your frustration.

Essential Support Packs are available from our sponsors at very reasonable rates and customers of these packs enjoy rapid response times.

On the issues that you have with the install, there are a number of questions in here and I think it would be best to go through these one-by-one.

You can tell whether the Essential Widgets are installed (and which version) by starting Protege and then going to the Help menu and selecting About Plugins. If the Essential Widgets have been installed successfully, you should see "Essential Architecture Manager Report Tab" in the list. If it's not listed, then then the install has failed.

Question: When you run the installer, does it take you through all of the stages listed on the install guide? Does it report any error messages either via its GUI or the console?

I've looked into the installer. It automatically runs (or at least requests to do so) in a privileged mode on Windows Vista and Windows 7. I think that it's possible that the Windows 2008 server OS identifies itself separately from Windows 7 (as you'd hope). The installer toolkit we use does not seem to explicitly recognise Windows Server 2008 (although it does recognise Server 2003).
I'll create an updated installer that runs in this mode for all Windows OS and hopefully this will ensure that the installer runs correctly on your chosen platform.

I'll post back later on, when this is available but in the meantime, I'd like to confirm the following with you:

A quick search on the forums showed that this approach to running the installer as admin seemed to work for some other members of our community. Perhaps this doesn't work on Server 2008 but would be worth having a look at? Again, all trace and error messages that you might be able to capture would help in resolving this. The answer was to do just as I advised, right-click on the JAR and explicitly select "Run As Administrator".

From your post, it is not clear whether you have tried this or assumed that it is not possible because the JAR is run by the JRE. As I say, this approach worked for some Windows 7 users.
Question: Could you confirm whether you have tried the right-click on the 'essentialinstall.jar'?


In terms of manually generating the snapshot of the repository, from an ease-of-use perspective, the answer is "no". However, if you don't mind a few steps, there is a process you can follow to get something to the Viewer. HOWEVER, I would point out that the Essential Widgets also include the 'AutoTextWidget' which is used throughout the model to manage fully-qualified names of many elements in the repository, so if the install of the Widgets has failed, it is likely that the repository many not be working correctly.

The process is:

1. Open Protege and your Essential repository project
2. From the menu, select File->Save As… to take a back up of your repository
3. From the menus, select File->Convert Project to Format…
4. Choose Experimental XML File (.xml)
5. Save this to 'reportXML.xml' somewhere sensible that you can easily find later on
6. Copy this 'reportXML.xml' to your <TOMCAT>/webapps/essential_viewer

The out of the box Views should show your content now, although I am concerned about the impact of not having the Essential Widgets installed and not having the AutoTextWidget available. Protege handles missing things very smoothly and safely but can lead to certain important attributes being hidden from you and this can cause problems with the model.

On the install, you may have already found the manual install guides (not using the installer). I'm also going to create a manual install pack so that if we run into problems like this where the installer will not run correctly, there's a manual way around it as a fallback. The installer is great (assuming the OS allows it to run!) but it cannot be unpacked to support manual installation.

Let me know about right-clicking on the 'essentialinstall.jar' file to run it as admin. I appreciate that you may have already tried this but I'd like to rule this out.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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jonathan.carter
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Just to let you know that I've uploaded a tweaked installer that runs in privileged mode on all Windows OS. You can download it from the Download page via the green download button.

Do let me know whether or not this resolves the install issues.

A successful install:
- puts essential_viewer.war in the <TOMCAT>/webapps
- unpacks the Essential Widgets to a folder called com.enterprise_architecture.essential.widgets in the <PROTEGE>/plugins folder
- Updates the out-of-the-box metaproject.[pprj, pins, pont] files in <PROTEGE>/examples/server OR deploys them to the user-chosen location
- puts the baseline Essential Repository project in the user-chosen location

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Just to let you know that I've uploaded a tweaked installer that runs in privileged mode on all Windows OS. You can download it from the Download page via the green download button.

Do let me know whether or not this resolves the install issues.

A successful install:
- puts essential_viewer.war in the <TOMCAT>/webapps
- unpacks the Essential Widgets to a folder called com.enterprise_architecture.essential.widgets in the <PROTEGE>/plugins folder
- Updates the out-of-the-box metaproject.[pprj, pins, pont] files in <PROTEGE>/examples/server OR deploys them to the user-chosen location
- puts the baseline Essential Repository project in the user-chosen location

Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan I will try this. But to let you know, I've tried right clicking on the JAR when logged in as administrator on Windows 2008 Server SP2 and there is no "run as administrator" option. There is that option when launching "Start_Protege_server.bat" so I'm not sure what the issue is here.

Secondly, the installer makes it all the way through without any errors. It just never installs the Viewer.WAR file. but the widgets sub-dir of Protege gets properly installed.
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jonathan.carter
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Thanks for the feedback.

Good to hear that the widgets are being deployed successfully. This suggests that the installer is managing to get rights to write to locations in the Program Files hierarchy (I know you have Protege in there and am assuming that Tomcat is also under Program Files somewhere?)

This gives me a clearer picture of what has been installed and what hasn't.

I think it's worth checking that the WAR file is being deployed but to the wrong location? e.g. <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL> rather than <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL>/webapps

Also, can you check the access rights/permissions on your TOMCAT folder under Program Files? It could be that despite running in Admin mode, the installer still cannot write to the webapps folder.

Now that I know that you have got the widgets installed properly, it sounds like you are using the Essential Architecture Reporting Tab which either returns an error or a success message BUT fails to send the repository snapshot to the Viewer webapp. Assuming this is the case, I think what might be happening is that the Viewer Report Service is receiving the snapshot but is unable to write to the webapps/essential_viewer folder.

Have a look at the access rights on the webapps folder and make sure that anything can write to it and we can take it from there.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks for the feedback.

Good to hear that the widgets are being deployed successfully. This suggests that the installer is managing to get rights to write to locations in the Program Files hierarchy (I know you have Protege in there and am assuming that Tomcat is also under Program Files somewhere?)

This gives me a clearer picture of what has been installed and what hasn't.

I think it's worth checking that the WAR file is being deployed but to the wrong location? e.g. <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL> rather than <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL>/webapps

Also, can you check the access rights/permissions on your TOMCAT folder under Program Files? It could be that despite running in Admin mode, the installer still cannot write to the webapps folder.

Now that I know that you have got the widgets installed properly, it sounds like you are using the Essential Architecture Reporting Tab which either returns an error or a success message BUT fails to send the repository snapshot to the Viewer webapp. Assuming this is the case, I think what might be happening is that the Viewer Report Service is receiving the snapshot but is unable to write to the webapps/essential_viewer folder.

Have a look at the access rights on the webapps folder and make sure that anything can write to it and we can take it from there.

Jonathan
no I had searched for the essential_viewer.WAR file prior to trying the manual download/install. Admin does have Full R/W/X control of the apache/Tomcat/Webapps directories, BUT like all the other directories in the Program Riles (x86) directory the contents of the directory are Read/Only. I'm not fully up on the implications this might have on a Java based installer vs. an install using the MSI Installer approach. I wonder if that's part of the problem

Note I have not yet had time to run the modified version you provided. That's on my task list today.
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jonathan.carter
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Sounds to me like the fact that the Program Files folders are Read Only is at the heart of it. Even if you're running as Admin, if the folder is read only, you're not going to be able to write anything in there - be you the installer or the Essential Viewer Report Service.

I would recommend going to the Tomcat folder and updating the permissions to allow at the very least Admin and whatever user Tomcat runs as to write to any folder in the Tomcat hierarchy. It may make sense to allow your user account to write to it, too.

The revised access control defaults in the very recent versions of Windows have caused a few problems like this. I'm going to look into some similar scenarios that we have recently encountered and post back.
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schulmkg
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Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks for the feedback.

Good to hear that the widgets are being deployed successfully. This suggests that the installer is managing to get rights to write to locations in the Program Files hierarchy (I know you have Protege in there and am assuming that Tomcat is also under Program Files somewhere?)

This gives me a clearer picture of what has been installed and what hasn't.

I think it's worth checking that the WAR file is being deployed but to the wrong location? e.g. <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL> rather than <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL>/webapps

Also, can you check the access rights/permissions on your TOMCAT folder under Program Files? It could be that despite running in Admin mode, the installer still cannot write to the webapps folder.

Now that I know that you have got the widgets installed properly, it sounds like you are using the Essential Architecture Reporting Tab which either returns an error or a success message BUT fails to send the repository snapshot to the Viewer webapp. Assuming this is the case, I think what might be happening is that the Viewer Report Service is receiving the snapshot but is unable to write to the webapps/essential_viewer folder.

Have a look at the access rights on the webapps folder and make sure that anything can write to it and we can take it from there.

Jonathan
Ok so I clicked the green download button on for the new download, but what I get is "essential.zip" with no executables that I can find, and when I extract it, many of the files are indentical to what I have already extracted previously.
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jonathan.carter
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I assume you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer?

As per the note just above the 'Download' link on the homepage, IE always renames a JAR file to a ZIP for some reason - and this is a well-documented issue with certain versions of Internet Explorer.

When you start the download, make sure that it is being saved as 'essentialinstall.jar' and not 'essentialinstall.zip'. If IE refuses to cooperate on this (it's done that to me many times!) once the download is complete, rename the 'essentialinstall.zip' to 'essentialinstall.jar'. Then the installer will run correctly.

Have you had a chance to change the permissions on the Tomcat folder? If not, I doubt even a 'privileged' installer will be able to write to a read-only folder.

Let me know how you get on

Jonathan
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schulmkg
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nd the only Catalina logs that have any new info inthem are the manager log, which simply shows the shutdown and restart of the Viewer app.

So as far as I can tell, even with R/O turned off and running from the admin account, the viewer.war file does not get properly installed
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jonathan.carter
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Thanks for the update.

Just to make sure we're not missing anything, is "turning off R/O" the same as enabling WRITE?

I'll put a manual install package together which will enable you to move/copy the war into <TOMCAT>/webapps manually to complete the install.

Jonathan
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neil.walsh
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Contact:

Just a brief thought that might help with your troubleshooting is to install to a folder in your users directory e.g. Documents. This will bypass the permissions issue and you will be able to ensure you have all the files you need. You can copy them manually if necessary.

This does feel like a permissions problem though...

If I think of anything else, I'll try and chip in

Cheers

Neil
schulmkg
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Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks for the feedback.

Good to hear that the widgets are being deployed successfully. This suggests that the installer is managing to get rights to write to locations in the Program Files hierarchy (I know you have Protege in there and am assuming that Tomcat is also under Program Files somewhere?)

This gives me a clearer picture of what has been installed and what hasn't.

I think it's worth checking that the WAR file is being deployed but to the wrong location? e.g. <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL> rather than <YOUR_TOMCAT_INSTALL>/webapps

Also, can you check the access rights/permissions on your TOMCAT folder under Program Files? It could be that despite running in Admin mode, the installer still cannot write to the webapps folder.

Now that I know that you have got the widgets installed properly, it sounds like you are using the Essential Architecture Reporting Tab which either returns an error or a success message BUT fails to send the repository snapshot to the Viewer webapp. Assuming this is the case, I think what might be happening is that the Viewer Report Service is receiving the snapshot but is unable to write to the webapps/essential_viewer folder.

Have a look at the access rights on the webapps folder and make sure that anything can write to it and we can take it from there.

Jonathan
As I think I mentioned before, I took off the R/O permissions to the whole "program files (x86)" tree so Tomcat/Webapps is R/W as is the upper level directories.

And no the essential_viewer.war is not being deployed to either location.
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jonathan.carter
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Thanks - I just wanted to make certain we'd not missed something.

Neil's suggestion above is excellent, by the way.

In your Documents folder, create a folder called "Viewer" and when the installer asks you where to deploy the Essential Viewer component, point it to this Documents/Viewer folder. Assuming that 'essential_viewer.war' is then installed to this folder, you can then copy it over to <TOMCAT>/webapps and once it's started Tomcat will unpack the WAR to create a new folder called 'essential_viewer' in its webapps folder.

Jonathan
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schulmkg
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Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks - I just wanted to make certain we'd not missed something.

Neil's suggestion above is excellent, by the way.

In your Documents folder, create a folder called "Viewer" and when the installer asks you where to deploy the Essential Viewer component, point it to this Documents/Viewer folder. Assuming that 'essential_viewer.war' is then installed to this folder, you can then copy it over to <TOMCAT>/webapps and once it's started Tomcat will unpack the WAR to create a new folder called 'essential_viewer' in its webapps folder.

Jonathan
Ok I tried that, and the viewer image I got is indistinguishable from the one I had installed.

Just to be sure, I blew away the essential_viewer subdir in Tomcat, shutdown the TomCat Service, Resarted Tomcat, Verified that Essentials was loaded, Forced it to reload using Tomcat/Manager.

And then I tried to publish the repository via the EssentialArchitectureReporting tab and got back the ususal error.
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jonathan.carter
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Sorry to make you repeat yourself.
Can you paste the messages that the Essential Reporting Tab is reporting into a post here, so that we can see it?

Also, check the catalina.out log file in <TOMCAT>/logs and if you could paste anything that it might have in terms of warnings or errors here that would be really helpful.

Thanks

Jonathan
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schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Sorry to make you repeat yourself.
Can you paste the messages that the Essential Reporting Tab is reporting into a post here, so that we can see it?

Also, check the catalina.out log file in <TOMCAT>/logs and if you could paste anything that it might have in terms of warnings or errors here that would be really helpful.

Thanks

Jonathan
There are no errors in the Tomcat/Catalina logs. There is only the tracking of me shutting down Tomcat, restarting Tomcat and forcing the reload of the Essential_viewer app

There are no Application, Security or System errors in the Windows Event logs

And the Error in the Essential ARchitecture REporting tab is

"Failed to send snapshot to the Report Service :
Essential Viewer ReportService could not be found a this URL."

and the "Report Service URL: is given as

Http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer/reportService


And I get the same behaviour whether I use no user credentials or the Admin Credentials for Tomcat
or the "essential" user account I set up for Tomcat and gave full "admin" role rights
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jonathan.carter
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Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks for the details.

The Essential Architecture Reporting Tab would report any problems with the username and password, so I don't think that's the problem at this stage.

If you go to you web browser what do you get if you use this URL:
http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer

Something I should have asked earlier. When you attempt to publish from the Protege client using the reporting tab, are you running Protege on the same server as Tomcat - i.e. Localhost?

If not, make sure to replace 'localhost' with the hostname of the server where Tomcat is running, in the URL on the reporting tab

Let me know about the URL and how you have set up / are using the multi user environment

Thanks

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks for the details.

The Essential Architecture Reporting Tab would report any problems with the username and password, so I don't think that's the problem at this stage.

If you go to you web browser what do you get if you use this URL:
http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer

Something I should have asked earlier. When you attempt to publish from the Protege client using the reporting tab, are you running Protege on the same server as Tomcat - i.e. Localhost?

If not, make sure to replace 'localhost' with the hostname of the server where Tomcat is running, in the URL on the reporting tab

Let me know about the URL and how you have set up / are using the multi user environment

Thanks

Jonathan
Yes it is the same machine. What we have set up - to minimize such path conflicts, is a Virtualized Windows Server 2008 VM that is running
The Tomcat Server
The Protege Server
the mySQL database (which we have not published to yet to minimize complexity)

And all the users TermServe into the server and run graphical terminal sessions.

So all the paths are "LocalHost" relative..

The only gotcha is that since the server is a 64bit machine, the 32bit apps are all installed into "program files (x86)" directory instead of "program files"

And since it is a Server OS, the default permissioning access is more restrictive. But because I don't know what account the Essentials reporting tab is trying to connect to the Essential Viewer, I don't know what account I might need to elevate.

SO I've been running the Publish Repository attempts logged into the server on the Administrator account as well as into the Protege Server as Admin

(note I have tried it with non-admin accounts as well, same result).

From IE I can connect to the Essential_viewer and look up technologies etc. BUT I cannot see any of the data we have entered.

Is there some way that I can manually jam the data into the viewer? I have to deliver the preliminary reports to the CTO of our company by this coming Friday. I fully thought that 1.5 mos would be enough to get the server up and running.
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

note, I'm convinced the issue is going to be a fairly simple one once we sort it out, but I've been very much heads down trying to enter some 180 offerings into the database while trying to get the servers to behave.
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jonathan.carter
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Great to hear that you're pushing on with getting the content into the repository. Normally, a couple of hours would be sufficient to get the more complex server installs running.

I agree that there's something simple at the heart of this.

In terms of user accounts, the credentials that can be entered on the Essential Architecture Reporting tab are optional but are related to the users that have been defined in your Tomcat environment as described in this article: Securing Essential Viewer.

However, note that these are optional and I would recommend NOT using the Tomcat security until you can establish a working solution.

So, to publish, leave the username and password entries empty for now (assuming that you have not edited the web.xml in the Essential Viewer installation in 'webapps' to enable security.)

Let's focus on making sure that we can communicate with the Report Service - once we do that we can get the Report Tab to publish.

Just to be clear, Tomcat and Essential Viewer must be running whenever you wish to publish from Protege.

Log into your Terminal Service on the server, open a browser and try to access the following URL:

http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer/reportService

You should get an error message back from Viewer telling you that you've got the wrong URL with a link to the Essential Viewer homepage.
If not, there's something not right with the Viewer install or Tomcat is not running Essential Viewer on that host at that port.

To receive the published repository - the Essential Viewer MUST be able to write to the webapps/essential_viewer folder. I recommend double-checking that this folder is write-enabled to all users, explicitly to make sure we're not false-assuming that it will inherit access control from further up the file system tree. If the Viewer cannot write to this folder, that could be the reason that we're not getting the repository published.

NOTE: The user account that Viewer uses will be the default Tomcat user (from a Windows System point of view) - not the user of the login account or the user of the Protege software.

In the meantime, I describe the process in this post earlier in this thread for manually getting the repository to Viewer. It's clunky, which is why we have the report tab but it works.

I'm pretty sure the answer to the problem here is to establish why the Essential Viewer Report Service is not responding OR is unable to write to its home folder.

The Essential Viewer Report Service updates the reportXML.xml file that you will find in <TOMCAT/webapps/essential_viewer/. Check that this is not marked READ ONLY or is protected in any way (it shouldn't be by default and is not on all other platforms). The ReportService MUST be able to over-write this.
Check the latest update data on this file - I'm assuming it is not Sep 2011.

I've just been looking at the ReportService source code - if it fails to write this file, the exception message is written to System.err. You should see this in one of the Tomcat log files (normally catalina.out).

Last thing to check is version compatibility between the Essential Widgets (that the Report Tab is part of) and the Essential Viewer. Assuming you have installed all the components from the installer, there will be no issue. But if you have installed an Essential Viewer that pre-dates the Version 2.4 or 2.5 of the Widgets, there could be an issue. I'm pretty sure from what you've described, though, that you've installed everything from the latest installer (one way or another).

Summary
Ensure that security for Essential Viewer is off. By default it is off and I think from what you've described it is not enabled. Make sure to leave the 'User' and 'Password' fields empty on the Report Tab.
Let me know what you get from trying to hit the reportService on the URL above from a Web Browser (rather than the Report Tab).
Also, let me know what the permissions are on the reportXML.xml file in the Viewer home folder on Tomcat are.
In the meantime, I've described the fall-back manual approach.

Look forward to hearing from you

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

Thanks Jonathan - I had missed the manual export to ReportXML.XML file.

I got that to work

OTOH I'm having serious problems getting the export functions to work. I am suspicious that the problem is the inability to enable R/W permissions for the WebDav directory and ReportXML.XML under Windows Server for the default user.

I've got to dive into it some more, but Windows Server 2008 onwards has made it increadibly difficult to allow "user level" modification of any files or directoris in the "program files" and "program files (x86)" directories.

This is intentionally so as part of the hard core "locked down by default" configuration of Windows that is what keeps the server attack surface at a minimum.

I would recommend if possible, reworking the Essential_viewer app to store its "reportXML.xml" file in the same place as the Essential_viewer project directory.

But in the meantime, I've got something I can work with.

I'll let you know what more I find out.
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jonathan.carter
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Thanks for the update. Great to hear that you have made some progress for Friday!

All we need is that Tomcat can write to its own webapps folder. And this is pretty standard for Tomcat to do anything, e.g. deploy new web apps etc.

I know we've discussed running things as Admin and so on for the installer but I found this IBM article about Tomcat on Windows 2008 that has some interesting points.

They recommend running the Tomcat startup as administrator - which would then mean that the Tomcat processes run as the administrator, which should mean that it can write to its own install location. As I said, systems like Tomcat need to be able to write to their own folders.

Have you tried starting Tomcat as Administrator instead of 'SYSTEM'?

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Thanks for the update. Great to hear that you have made some progress for Friday!

All we need is that Tomcat can write to its own webapps folder. And this is pretty standard for Tomcat to do anything, e.g. deploy new web apps etc.

I know we've discussed running things as Admin and so on for the installer but I found this IBM article about Tomcat on Windows 2008 that has some interesting points.

They recommend running the Tomcat startup as administrator - which would then mean that the Tomcat processes run as the administrator, which should mean that it can write to its own install location. As I said, systems like Tomcat need to be able to write to their own folders.

Have you tried starting Tomcat as Administrator instead of 'SYSTEM'?

Jonathan
I have not tried running Tomcat as Administrator since the idea is to have it restart and run as a service. I'm not sure the IBM article is talking about running Tomcat as Adminstrator - rather I think they are referring to the Jazz Server - which is just like starting the Protege Server using "run as administrator".

And in fact the Tomcat docs say something about how no matter how you start Tomcat - on Windows Server it will run under the Service account
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jonathan.carter
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Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Fair enough.
Surely it's possible to allow the SYSTEM user to write to the Tomcat folder?

However, it's worth exploring what happens if you explicitly run it as Admin to see if that solves the problem. Then it's a matter of allow the SYSTEM user to write to that folder.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
schulmkg
Posts: 35
Joined: 02 Aug 2011, 18:46

jonathan.carter wrote:Fair enough.
Surely it's possible to allow the SYSTEM user to write to the Tomcat folder?

However, it's worth exploring what happens if you explicitly run it as Admin to see if that solves the problem. Then it's a matter of allow the SYSTEM user to write to that folder.

Jonathan
I believe System and Service are two different accounts. I was trying to give additional permissions to other accounts in the TomCat directory and the system policy precluded it. I suspect it has something to do with policy enforcement via Active Directory Domain management.

Which would be a problem going forwards for Essentials in any AD/Windows Server 2008 environment
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jonathan.carter
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Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

I understand what you are saying but I would suggest that SYSTEM (which is not a user account) is a valid account to be granted write access in that folder. Many - if not all - of the services (including Tomcat) will be running on the server as SYSTEM and these are often likely to need to be able to write to folders within their install location, e.g. log files.

Essential Viewer is a web application and by definition needs to run within the runtime environment of the suitable web application server. In the case of Tomcat, this is the /webapps folder. Now, where Apache decide to locate this folder is up to them - currently, as we know that is within the Tomcat Program Files folder - but there are good security reasons as to why it should be sandboxed within the web application server.

I think it would help a lot in getting to them bottom of this problem to know whether running Tomcat explicitly as Admin (i.e. not as a service) just to see if that resolves the problem. This would at least conclusively identify what the issue is.

Some further investigation of using Tomcat on Windows 2008 Server should give us some further tips - perhaps there's a switch to throw in Tomcat that we're missing. We'll look into this and report back.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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