When will Clustering go Binary ?

[romalley]

I take it that to get to the clustering features, we need to get the latest 3.0.1 RC1 code, download it and build.

This is a great way to get some early access to these capabilitites.

Is there an expected date when the RC1 will be considered ready for release as a binary distribution? Will the relevant components of clustering make it to that distribution? Is there some sort of certification process that happens before a component goes binary?

In my case, I am interested only in the ha-httpsession stuff to enable clustering of http session state.

Bob

[romalley]

Well, I found that there IS a binary version of jboss-3.0.1RC1 out on sourceforge.net that's bundled with Tomcat 4.04 so I downloaded that.

Turns out that it has cluster-service.xml but it does NOT have jbossha-httpsession.sar.

So, I went ahead and downloaded the the cvs sources from jboss-all. Turns out you get a version called 4.0 alpha rather than the 3.0.1 stuff. Ought to figure out how to get a CVS label from backwards in time.

At any rate, I took the jboss-httpsession.sar from the 4.0 alpha, along with the newer matching javagroups2.0 and jbossha.jar files.

Now, when I try to deploy, the bossha-httpsession gives an error 'Failed to load metadata' and 'Incomplete Deployment Listing'. I suspect this is a common EJB error but I rarely use EJBs so have not encountered in JBoss yet.

Any Ideas?

Bob

[romalley]

Yeah!

Upon doing the build against the CVS release JBoss_3_0_1 branch, I end up getting a version of jbossha-httpsession.sar that DOES work with the JBoss3.0.1RC1 server. Placed it in my deploy folder along with cluster-service.xml and viola, clustering works!

I am using the IIS plugin do do my sticky load balancing for Tomcat 4.0.4. Am also using jdk1.3.1_01. When this works, you see your session ID no longer has the 'jvmRoute' (same name as the worker name in your worker.properties file) appended to the end as it does with sticky sessions without clustering. Instead, the sessionId has two astrisks at the end. At any rate, you can turn off one of your servers and viola, the same exact session continues on the other server.

Way to go guys!

Bob

p.s.: Now I've got a bunch of classes that are not serializable, so I still have some work to do. An error is thrown as soon as the non-serializable objects are placed on the session. My bad.

[slaboure]

Hello,

I am happy to hear that it works for you. Which IIS plugin do you speak from? Do you have an URL for it?

Thank you. Cheers,


Sacha

[romalley]

The IIS Plugin I am using is the one Jakarta released for Tomcat 3.x. It communicates with Tomcat using ajp13.

For some reason, the Jakarta site stopped including the plugin with the Tomcat 4.x release so you have to go back to 3.3. The howto for 3.3 pretty much works for 4.0 and the link is here: http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-3.3-doc/tomcat-iis-howto.html

Tomcat 4.x continues to support ajp13 and that is it's primary means of communication for an Apache web server. The IIS plug-in from what I can tell uses the same communication handshake as if you were using Apache web server. The one drawback to doing the Tomcat 4.x install is that it doesn't generate the configuration settings for you.

There is an excelent link at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~lampante/howto/tomcat/iisnt/ that tells step by step how to get this plugin working with Tomcat 4.x. It provides the properties files that are not auto-generated.

Bob

[slaboure]

Thank you Romalley,

As Jetty also implements a ajp13 connector, it is nice to know about such a tool

Cheers,


Sacha