clearing up issues around jsvc or jakarta commons daemon

[Herve Quiroz]

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 10:31:37AM +0100, Tim Diggins wrote:
> having googled and read around, there seems to be an approach to jakarta 
> commons daemon (jsvc) that I don't understand. There is no FreeBSD port 
> of it (there are darwinports and other OSX ports, however).
> 
> The last discussion of this  [1] simply states - "you must use .... 
> (apache + mod_webdav/mod_proxy/mod_jk)" -- no discussion of why...

This is not the last discussion of jakarta-commons-daemon actually. I
can't give the exact URL but there was a similar dsicussion months ago
and we ended up testing various approaches to manage the Tomcat daemon.
One of them was to use commons-daemon. I submitted a port for it and
someone even improved it. But at the end, the approach that was chosen
was to use catalina from some custom-made rc.d script that is shipped
with the port.

> However almost all *recent* informed discussion in the tomcat world 
> suggests that one should never just blindly serve tomcat behind apache, 
> unless there is reason to - instead you serve your application both 
> ways, profile them both and choose the optimal solution (many times 
> standalone tomcat is more appropriate, even with lots static files)
> 
> With Jsvc / jakarta commons daemon, you can then start up tomcat on port 
> 80 (and switch down to a lesser user) - just like apache httpd. On the 
> tomcat site, there are full instructions[2]  for how to compile on the 
> tomcat site (including specific details for FreeBSD - there are even 
> FreeBSD binaries around).

You can already start a standalone Tomcat daemon with the version from
the ports. It does not even requires Apache to build or install. Just
use the rc.d script:

$ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/tomcat55.sh start
$ /usr/local/etc/rc.d/tomcat55.sh stop

> So why no port? If there's just no one willing to do it, that's cool, 
> but is there some reason that it __should not__ be done (security?), it 
> would be good to understand that.

If you really need commons-daemon, I could probably repost it, although
I think it is available from the archives of the list (and you would be
sure to get the most improved version).

Herve