Raible Designs

What's the best way to setup networked printing?

I made the switch to my new XP box last night - swapping hard drives, CD Burners, etc. from the old to the new. In the process of putting 1.5 GB of RAM into my Linux box, I thought I'd upgrade Samba to 3.0 and setup a shared printer. Samba upgrade - piece of cake. Installing a printer on RedHat - no luck. I've tried it before, but I've never succeeded. I have a HP OfficeJet G85 that is a great printer. My main goal is to setup this printer as a shared printer on Linux or XP and I'll be able to print to it via OS X, Windows XP and RedHat 9. However, I can never get it installed on RedHat - even though I select the right printer (using printconf-gui). It does recognize it as a USB device, but it can't print to it. On Windows XP, the printer installs (and works) just fine, but I can't print to it from OS X or RedHat - it just doesn't work. Here's what happens on both:

• OS X 10.3: I select Windows Printing and I can navigate to my XP Box, but I can't connect. When I try to view the printers, it hangs for a couple of minutes - then I'm prompted for a login and my XP login doesn't work. This same login/password works just fine for connecting to shared drives. I think it's a bug in Panther.
• RedHat 9: I select Queue Type: Networked Windows (SMB) and my Windows box does not show up in the list (just the RedHat box and my PowerBook). If I try to manually enter my server, printer, etc. it just flashes and prompts me again.

I do have a wireless print server that I could probably use, but that's hooked up to our Canon 900 Photo Printer - which only seems to work well if it's plugged into the wireless print server. We've tried to plug it directly into a Windows box and print, and the quality just isn't as good - who knows why. I bought a USB hub for it in hopes of hooking up multiple printers, but that doesn't work either.

I wish I could just give my HP an IP address - then it would probably work for all of them, but alas, all it has is USB.

The fun part of all this switching hard drives? I thought I lost a 20 GB drive of important data this morning - I was up until 2 a.m. last night trying to fix it. Luckily, I got some assistance from Experts-Exchange this morning and didn't lose a thing.

Update: I got this all working using HPOJ and CUPS. I did have to uninstall LPRng and cups from Red Hat 9 - then re-install CUPS from source. I also had to install Ghostscript and all its fonts. Finally, to get it to share the printer via Samba, I had to tweak some Samba config files.

My Development Environment

To make is easier for folks to use AppFuse and Struts Resume, I put together a page for HowTo Configure your Development Environment. This is how I've configured my environment and it works pretty darn well for me. Really, none of the document is AppFuse specific - it just shows where I put J2SE, J2EE, Ant, Tomcat, and how to setup your environment variables. Comments or other suggestions are welcome.

My IDEA Evaluation - Eclipse is better

I've been trying to use IDEA (on OS X) for the past few weeks and I keep reverting back to Eclipse for features that seem to be missing. I know the features must be there, but I just can't find them. Why else would everyone like it so much? Sidenote: I've never used IDEA for a feature that doesn't exist in Eclipse - I'm sure there are some, I'm just not using them. It sure would be cool if someone created a HowTo explaining how to migrate from Eclipse to IDEA. In the meantime, I'll settle for posting my questions here:

• Debugging in Tomcat - I'm currently using Sysdeo's Tomcat Plugin in Eclipse for Tomcat 4.1.27. It's super easy to setup and use - I expect the same ease-of-use from IDEA. I haven't looked much, but I'd love to hear feedback on IDEA's Tomcat debugging support.
• Renaming a variable in a JavaBean renames getter and setter methods. Sounds simple enough, in my 10 second search, I couldn't find it. In Eclipse, right-click -> Refactor -> Rename.
• Override/Implement methods (from parent classes and interfaces). Right click -> Source -> Override/Implement methods in Eclipse.

I'll add more as I think of them throughout the day. So far, I like IDEA, but to be honest - it's not saving me any time over Eclipse. It also locks up as much as Eclipse and it's responsiveness is still a big sluggish on OS X (10.2.8) with 1 GB of RAM (1.33 MHz processor). Hopefully Panther will make both IDEs faster. Two weeks ago, I was thinking of buying it (as well as Dreamweaver) - now I'm frustrated with IDEA's lack of features and Dreamweaver's slowness. I'll probably pass on shelling out the cash since Eclipse and BBEdit are giving me all the features I need in IDEA and Dreamweaver.

HowTo: Integrate Apache and Resin

From a comment that an anonymous use left: Resin with Apache on Unix. I have used Tomcat for this site for over a year, and the last two projects I've worked on used Tomcat in production. However, James Duncan Davidson indicated that Tomcat was really never meant for production, and it never hurts to broaden one's horizons. I doubt I'll use Resin on this site, but I might recommend it to my next client (if I can get up to speed fast enough).

Why don't I just use Resin's built-in HTTP Server? Because I like Apache's virtual hosting feature and it's #1 for a reason, right?

Skinning your applications and Apache+Tomcat on RH9

Here are a couple of links I found on mailing lists that might be of use:

• Xkins: Xkins framework uses Velocity to process snippets of HTML, but you can use any other template processor (Xkins comes with it's own default processor). Xkins also comes with Forms Tag Libs, that allows you to create forms using Xkins and comes with four Skins. Xkins Forms integrates with Struts framework. Xkins also fits perfect in JSF world, playing a role as a RenderKit, and can work with other presentation frameworks, (i.e. struts-layout).I'll stick with simple XHTML and CSS. If I need different layouts (HTML), I'll use a different base tile.
• John Turner has published a Tomcat 4.1.27 + Apache 2.0.47 HowTo. This is similar to mine, but looks much cleaner and to the point.

Later: I discovered the beauty of John's HowTo this evening. It allows you to specify one measly line in Apache's httpd.conf file and only a few lines in Tomcat's server.xml file and viola Tomcat configures itself! It sets up aliases and such for each webapp that you have deployed. As an example, here's dynamically created section for AppFuse:

#################### localhost:/appfuse ####################                                       
                                                                                                       
# Static files                                                                                     
Alias /appfuse "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse"                              
                                                                                                       
<Directory "/opt/dev/tools/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.27/webapps/appfuse">                         
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks                                                                 
    DirectoryIndex index.jsp                                                                       
</Directory>                                                                                  

# Deny direct access to WEB-INF and META-INF                                                       
#                                                                                                  
<Location "/appfuse/WEB-INF/*">                                                                 
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                 
                                                                                                       
<Location "/appfuse/META-INF/*">                                                              
    AllowOverride None                                                                             
    deny from all                                                                                  
</Location>                                                                                   
                                                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/j_security_check  ajp13                                                           
JkMount /appfuse/auth/*  ajp13                                                                     
JkMount /appfuse/register/*  ajp13                                                                 
JkMount /appfuse/passwordHint/*  ajp13                                                             
JkMount /appfuse/*.do  ajp13                                                                       
JkMount /appfuse/*.jsp  ajp13                                  

I had all of this working great - I even had Apache upgraded to 2.0.47 on OS X (serving localhost/~user files and everything)! And then I rebooted... Now in catalina.out, I'm getting the following - ugh...

BAD packet 256                                                                                      
In: : [B@c283b5 4/843                                                                               
01 00 03 47 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ...G............                                 
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  | ................ 

WTF?!

Solved: I got this solved fairly easily. I had modified /usr/sbin/apachectl so that the HTTPD variable pointed to /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd rather than /usr/sbin/httpd. I fixed it by removing /usr/bin/apachectl and executing "ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl". Now if I could only get the Rendezvous mod working on 2.0.x.

OS X Rocks, but it sucks too

OS X is awesome ~ it's beautiful to look at and it's based on Unix. What more could you ask for? Windows XP looks good, RedHat 9 doesn't. Windows XP with Cygwin is almost tollerable, but you still have to type "cd c:" when you want to change drives. What bugs me about OS X is simple *nix things don't work on it. Integrating Apache + Tomcat is a 5 minute job on WinXP and RH 9, but I've spent the at least 10 hours trying to do it on OS X with no luck. I could post the errors here, but what good would it do? This kind of stuff just works on RH 9 and WinXP. Therefore, OS X sucks!

What am I ranting for? No reason really - it just sucks that I've spent so much time trying to do something that still doesn't work. This HowTo didn't help either (building from source had errors, no binary of Apache available). I guess this is all due to the fact that OS X has a 1% (maybe 2%) market share among developers?

SSHD on Windows

I know I read about setting up SSHD on Windows on someone's blog, but I can't remember who and I can't find the link. It's a very good HowTo - I was able to get this bad boy up and running in about 3 minutes! Nice, now I have a command-line interface into all my machines. Now if I could only find Desktop clients (like VNC, but as good as Remote Desktop Connection). RDC rocks, especially if you're going from Windows XP to Windows XP. I'm using VNC, but it's clunky and slow. I'd like to find something (for both OS X and RedHat 9) that is as responsive as RDC. I've heard of Timbuktu and Apple's Remote Desktop, but both are spendy and I like free.

HowTo: Check for JUnit in $ANT_HOME/lib

One of the most common problems with my sample apps is that developers (when compiling from source) forget to put junit.jar in their $ANT_HOME/lib directory. I put it in the README, but I guess no one reads that sucker. So now I have a new strategy - stop the build if it's not there:

<!-- Check that junit.jar is in $ANT_HOME/lib -->
<available classname="junit.framework.TestCase" 
    property="junit.present"/>
<fail unless="junit.present" 
    message="Please copy junit.jar into ${env.ANT_HOME}/lib"/>

HowTo: Using XDoclet's StrutsForm and a 41KB j2ee.jar

To generate Struts' ActionForms using XDoclet, you need to have j2ee.jar in your classpath. Did you know you can trim it down to 41 KB and get all the functionality you need? Learn more...

Maven and Automation of Build/Test/Deploy process

I've convinced the folks at my new project to use Maven for organizing, building and testing our projects. It's my recommendation because they have many (5+) webapps that all have the same dependencies. Maven was the obvious choice to eliminate duplication and standardize directory structures, etc. So my question is - how do I automate our build/test/deploy process? I currently use Anthill with Ant, and wish I could use it with Maven. Last time I checked, I couldn't. I've heard I could use CruiseControl. If that's true (and recommended over Anthill) - anyone got a HowTo?