Today was really nice, except for the weather though; it was bitterly cold and I tend to get really home sick when it gets this cold. I still got to learn quite a bit about how things work in a typical Windows server environment though. So I spent the early hours of this afternoon with a colleague who manages the MS Win 2K3 i386 production server where the DSpace instance I set up is going to run from; we were essentially configuring IIS to proxy requests through to Tomcat 6… we used Apache’s ISAPI IIS filter plugin to achieve our overall objective. Here’s how I did it during a pilot test I conducted, prior to the actual configuration on the production server…
The test environment has the specification below, however, something tells me this can pretty much be replicated on a different setup, especially that the production server runs a 32bit MS Win2K3 operating system and my test environment runs an x86 64 OS.
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows 2003 Server x86 64bit Enterprise Edition
- Apache Tomcat: Tomcat 6.0
- Internet Information Services (IIS): 6.0
Part #1: ISAPI Plugin Overview
Part #2: ISAPI Plugin Configuration Files
Part #3: IIS Configuration
Part #4: DSpace Context Paths Mapping
Some points to note;
- I know Windows well enough to stay away from the registry as much as possible
- Checking Event Viewer application logs helps a lot when debugging problems
- Download the right version of ISAPI filter… we spent a good 20 minutes on production server trying to figure out why requests weren’t being proxied through to Tomcat
- Read the reference documentation, there is some pretty helpful information in there…
- I’ve left out obvious details –check reference documentation for details
Bibliography
[1] http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/reference/iis.html
[2] http://www.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-connectors/jk/binaries/windows
[3] http://tomcat.apache.org/connectors-doc/webserver_howto/iis.html
[4] http://www.innotechcg.com/tech/HowTo/How%20To%20Install%20Apache%20Tomcat%20with%20IIS6.pdf