Etherpad CentOS installation

Nuba has written a fantastic guide for installing Etherpad onto CentOS – I recommend you follow that before reading this.

My problem is that the JAR wouldn’t compile on my box.

I ran into a problem, my box wouldn’t let me use fsc (Fast Scala Compiler) so I had to change the fsc references to use scalac(Scala Compiler) then I could compile the JAR.  I also had to use JAR instead of FastJAR

This isn’t a guide as such, just an overview of how I fixed the problems I had.

Installing Shibboleth SP 2 on CentOS to the ukfederation w/ Godaddy certs

Internet 2 give some “creative” documentation for this procedure so I thought I’d write some that are easier to follow:


Part 0. Planning. (2 hours)

  1. Download CentOS Netimage boot CD from http://centos.org
  2. Receive approval from the UK federation for your service.
  3. Purchase a cheep Godaddy Cert or have one ready for your service. Be aware that you will be getting 1 SSL cert to secure your resource and another SSL cert (a self signed one) to talk to the UK federation. Do not get these certificates confused!
  4. Create the appropriate DNS records to point to the IP of your resource and the IP of your SP. IE shib.yourdomain.com (your resource) should resolve to the IP of the apache server and sp.yourdomain.com (service provider) should resolve to the same IP.

Part 1. Install (2 hours)

First things first. Install Cent OS. You don’t need a gui or anything fancy, just a web server. Do all the blow as a root user.

Set the your hostname in /etc/sysconfig/network & /etc/hosts to match the FQDN of your SP ie sp.yourdomain.com

Install ntp date and set the date (you might want to add a cron job for this):

yum install ntp.i386
ntpdate pool.ntp.org

NOTE: BELOW IS NOW DEFUNCT AND YOU SHOULD USE THE DOCUMENTATION HERE – although still complete the SELINUX section

cd /root/
curl -O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/log4shib-1.0.3-1.1.i386.rpm \
-O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/xerces-c-3.0.1-5.1.i386.rpm \
-O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/xml-security-c-1.5.1-3.2.i386.rpm \
-O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/xmltooling-1.2.2-1.i386.rpm \
-O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/opensaml-2.2.1-1.i386.rpm \
-O http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/downloads/shibboleth/cppsp/2.2.1/RPMS/i386/RHE/5/shibboleth-2.2.1-2.i386.rpm

The above will put the files you need in /root

Edit /etc/yum.conf (use vi or nano) copy the gpgcheck command and then comment it out to read #gpgcheck=yes, set gpgcheck=no below the commented line.

yum -y install ntp
/usr/sbin/ntpdate pool.ntp.org
yum localinstall xerces-c-3.0.1-5.1.i386.rpm
yum -y install unixODBC.i386
rpm -ivh log4shib-1.0.3-1.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh xml-security-c-1.5.1-3.2.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh xmltooling-1.2.2-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh opensaml-2.2.1-1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh shibboleth-2.2.1-2.i386.rpm

The above will install the packages. Your shibboleth config will live in /etc/shibboleth


Edit /etc/selinux/config
Comment out SELINUX=enforcing
Type in SELINUX=disabled

setenforce 0

Warning: This will disable some security options, it can be left enabled but tweeks will need to be made to the socket restrictions later on. Can someone please document this better?


Or instead of doing above you can use system-config-securitylevel-tui to disable and restart selinux

/usr/sbin/shibd -v

Will return the version of shibboleth installed. If it does then:

CentOS Netinstall 5.4 ISO installation

Iv’e had to install CentOS 10+ times today and I wanted to quickly document my procedure:

  1. Grab http://mirror.sov.uk.goscomb.net/centos/5.4/isos/i386/CentOS-5.4-i386-netinstall.iso & boot from it however you/I want.
  2. Select HTTP install then for server type: mirror.centos.org
  3. For path type: centos/5.4/os/i386
Go go gadget arms.