dalts.net Kind Acts of Randomness

Working on a content repository for a client at the moment - have been evaluating JackRabbit and Alfresco as a backend repository for an existing site. Anyway - I was already familiar with Alfresco, but spent a bit of time with JackRabbit today to give a comparison. It's a nice simple implementation of the JCR (JSR-170), but suffers a little from lack of doco when it comes to using it in something other than it's standard configuration.

I needed to test it with Mysql on Tomcat 6 - didn't really have any doco on this - so I added a new page to the wiki. Hopefully this is of use to someone:

http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/JackRabbitOnTomcat6

If you are not into Java and are looking for a way to access JackRabbit, there is WebDAV and also Apache Sling - which provides a RESTful api to JackRabbit. It's in the incubator still - but looks quite nice and has some potential.

I use X11 forwarding a fair bit with ssh - it's so nice to just do "ssh -X user@host" and be able to run the odd command that needs X.

Anyway - came across a little problem this morning with a Ubuntu server that I was trying to do this on. For those that have never used Ubuntu server - it is like the full Ubuntu desktop but basically with all the X stuff stripped out. I like to run this - as I really don't need X on a headless server and it saves me on some CPU/memory and makes apt-get upgrade nice and fast.

Anyway - back to X11 forwarding - with Ubuntu server when I tried to launch an X application - I got the message

Error: no display specified

Had a look through the environment variables - and the DISPLAY variable had not been set like ssh -X automatically does. Tried to set it manually, but nothing.

I then discovered with the help of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSHHowto that xauth is not installed by default with Ubuntu server. A quick.

apt-get install xauth

Fixed everything up nicely. Happy happy joy joy.