Complete Pentaho Installation on Ubuntu, Part 5

Prepare your ‘Production’ Server

There are a few things we can do to our working server:

Usefull Changes

1. Add your own logo
2. Remove user selection login option
3. Modify login screen text
4. Increase connection timeout
5. Increase memory limit for apache
6. Set up a publishing password
7. Change your passwords
8. Remove warning messages.

Optional Activities

9. Rename your Server and port if necesary
10. Use a connection pool to avoid disconnection
11. Move the database to other machine (not standard)
12. Customize the BI server messages (rarely needed)
13. Email account setup
14. Automatic startup
15. Additional notes

Not all of them are needed in your installation, choose which one you’ll use and which ones will be common in your developer and production server. Work up to that point and make a file system [folders] copy to deploy in your server machine. Continue the configuration on that server.

I come from a developer background where an additional quality server would be set up to test work in progress and deployment packages before releasing them into production but in BI I think that’s too much, the two environments are enough to avoid shooting yourself on the foot either by over-confidence, late hour distractions or human error.

In any case the backup policy of the servers should be independent. One for continuing operation depending on how fast a machine can be set up with the last data snapshot used. The other one is an incremental backup so you’ll won’t loose more than one or few day’s work.

To do the backup you shut down the DB and BI servers and copy the folders, just remember to set up the replacement machines with the same names. Or do a SQL backup with MySql Administrator or ‘Percona XtraBackup’ that can do a hot -operational- DB backup for your InnoDB tables (ISAM tables use a table locks). For the BI folder, copying the files are enough.

1. Add your own logo

To change the top-right image of ‘Pentaho’ overwrite the logo.png image in:

3.8 [152×60 pixels]: /Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/mantle/

3.9 [152×75 pixels]: /Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/mantle/themes/onyx/images and …/themes/slate/images

By the way, the login screen logo [224×94 pixels] in 3.9 is at:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho-style/images/login/logo.png

2. Remove user selection login option

If you have tested your users and your admin user and password (for authorization you’ll need Admin, Authenticated and ceo roles) you can hide the user selector from the login dialog. Edit the following XML file:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/pentaho.xml

and change the content from true to false:

3.8: <login-show-users-list>false</login-show-users-list> 
3.9 and 3.10: <login-show-sample-users-hint>false</login-show-sample-users-hint> 

3. Modify login screen text

Pentaho uses the first screen to present their product to new users. You might want to replace them with your project objectives, links for specific user manuals, tips, instructional videos*, news or local resources.

Specifically -I think- you’ll want to modify the scary text “Supplied free of charge with no support… no maintenance, no warranty” into something more conforting like “Pentaho Open Source Enterprise Quality Software supported by [use your contact data]”.

You can use the ‘Komposer’ editor to easily modify the text in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/jsp/PUCLogin.jsp

* For screencast videos I recomend wink (windows freeware) it produces flash files. Or if you are adventurous, use services with text-to-speach characters like http://www.xtranormal.com or http://goanimate.com/, short videos are great for instructional guides.

This has been fixed, this is no longer needed

[Edit: In 3.9 4.0 this file should be edited to remove the demo users to apear if you click on the Evaluation Login link. Search for joe, and remove the following text (strikedthrough) and replace de text striked and bold like this:
<tr>    <td style=”font-size: .8em;”>  <strong>Administrator</strong><br>     User Name: joe<br>  Password: password</td>     <td style=”font-size: .8em;”>  <strong>Business User</strong><br>     User Name: suzy<br> Password: password</td>
</tr>  <tr>    <td colspan=”3″ style=”padding: 4px 20px 0 0; font-size: .8em;”>    <a href=”http://www.pentaho.com/helpmeout/&#8221; target=”_blank”>Request free evaluation support.</a>    <img src=”/pentaho-style/images/login/help_link.png” width=”20″ height=”20″ align=”absbottom”>    </td>    <td style=”font-size: .8em;”>Contact [your data] for user accounts and support </td> </tr>

4. Increase connection timeout

The default browser session connection time out is 30 minutes, you can change that modifying the file:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/conf/web.xml

The unit is in minutes so for 3 hours set it to:

<session-timeout>180</session-timeout>

and also with the same xml tag in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml

5. Increase memory limit for apache

This activity was a must in previous versions, but now the parameters are ok. Anyway if you want to play with the variable -I havent found benchmarks on it- you can edit:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/start-pentaho.sh

set memory minimum (Xms) and maximum (Xmx) in tomcat, for example: -Xms516m -Xmx1024m

CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx768m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000 -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=3600000"

6. Set up a publishing password

On future articles we’ll be saving queries, metada or OLAP models into the production web server. But you need to set the ‘publishing password’. In the file:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/publisher_config.xml

type a password:

<publisher-password>[your-password]</publisher-password>

7. Change your passwords

There are several steps for this to work:

• Set up a new user as administrator.
  – Start PAC (administrator console).
  – Add Admin and ceo roles to your selected user.
• Stop PAC and the BI server.
• Change the database passwords.
  – Enter theMySql  administrator
  – Change the passwords for: pentaho_admin, pentaho_user and hibuser.
• Re-edit the following files with the new passwords:
  – hibuser password in:
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/hibernate/
  mysql5.hibernate.cfg.xml
  -All user’s passwords in:
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/simple-jndi/
  jdbc.properties
  – hibuser password in:
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/
  applicationContext-spring-security-jdbc.xml
  and (tanks to Raul Chavarría and mahamood notes):
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/
  applicationContext-spring-security-hibernate.properties
  – hibuser and pentaho_user passwords in this identical files:
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/pentaho.xml
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/META-INF/context.xml
• Edit the URL tag and change joe and password to your new user and password in
  <URL>…userid=joe&amp;password=password</URL> in the file:
  /Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/olap/datasources.xml
• There are some examples (.xaction files)… but check them as you click on them and they report errors.
• Reset the server and test.
• In the PAC delete the demo users: joe, pat, suzy, tiffany

8. Remove warning messages

In 3.9.stable and up the OLAP results of jpivot shows a warning about being deprecated in favor of the new PAT OLAP browser:

JPivot has been replaced by Pentaho Analyzer.
It is provided as a convenience but will no longer be enhanced or offically supported by Pentaho.

and I think it will not be appreciated by your users. As it is really not true that PAT has all jpivot needed functionallity, not yet you can eliminate it with a CSS tag in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/adhoc/styles/

there are two files: jpivot.css y jpivotIE6.css.You need to add this at the bottom:

#deprecatedWarning { display: none; }

In the query tool WAQR, there is also a message to remove

In the file adhoc.css  at the bottom add:

#waqrDeprecatedAlert { display: none; }

9. Rename your Server (and Port if necesary)

Your ‘localhost’ url must be changed so it can be reached from any computer in your network. Use your machine name as its already mapped on the network.

The default port is 8080 that’s a port for web development so it is probably used on a server, check with your system administrator for a free port or take the next one available like the enterprise edition does. If its a new machine you can leave it as it is.

The same files and lines are used to change the server name and port. The most important one is the tomcat (or web application server) services definition file:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml

search for ‘localhost’ and modify [your server]:[your port] like BISERVER1:8086

<param-name>fully-qualified-server-url</param-name>
<param-value>http://BISERVER1:8086/pentaho/</param-value>

now that we are in this file we’ll add the IP address from the machines will be connecting from the administration console, use a comma separated list:

<param-name>TrustedIpAddrs</param-name>
<param-value>[your.own.pcs.ip]<param-value>

save it and edit:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/conf/server.xml

First change the port (On 3.9 4.0):

<Connector URIEncoding=”UTF-8″ port=”8086” protocol=”HTTP/1.1″  
           connectionTimeout=”20000″  
           redirectPort=”8443″ />

then the server:

<Engine name=”Catalina” defaultHost=”BISERVER1“>

<Host name=”BISERVER1”  appBase=”webapps”
unpackWARs=”true” autoDeploy=”true”
xmlValidation=”false” xmlNamespaceAware=”false”>

Some other files may need to be edited depending if you’re puting services in diferent machines but if they remain in your server localhost will be ok, for example, the OLAP services will work with localhost in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/olap/datasources.xml

but if you changed the port you’ll need to change it to [your-server]:[your-port] like:

<URL>http://biserver1:8086/…

[Edit with the Saiku update this is no longer necesary]
If you installed saiku then edit also:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/saiku/WEB-INF/web.xml

There are other files to modify if you change the localhost-port but depend on each service. Like the metadata.mxi from the schema editor, it will be mentiones on its own post.

10. Use a connection pool

For running an uninterrupted service or inclusive for more than 8 hours you might want to use a connection pool manager that adds more advantages than just maintaining an open connection to MySQL at all times.

In the Pentaho forum they recommended c3p0 as a connection pool. So download the file

c3p0-0.9.1.2.jar

and put it into library folders:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/lib
/Pentaho/biserver/administration-console/lib

And add this lines:

<!– connection pool–>
<property name=”connection.provider_class”>org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.acquire_increment”>3</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.idle_test_period”>10</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.min_size”>5</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.max_size”>75</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.max_statements”>0</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.timeout”>25200</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.preferredTestQuery”>Select 1</property>
<property name=”hibernate.cp3p0.testConnectionOnCheckout”>true</property>
<property name=”hibernate.c3p0.acquireRetryAttempts”>30</property>
<property name=”hibernate.c3p0.acquireIncrement”>5</property>
<property name=”hibernate.c3p0.idleConnectionTestPeriod”>300</property>

to your hibernate connection file in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/hibernate/mysql5.hibernate.cfg.xml

just at the top, after the tag <session-factory>. Restart your server.

11. If you’ll move the database to other machine

Update your server and ports, users and password on:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/olap/datasources.xml
/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/simple-jndi/jdbc.properties

Change your strings [new-server]:[new-port]

12. If you’ll need to customize the BI server messages

Some messages in the BI server (console app) can be easily changed in case you’ll need more personalized texts. There is an excelent blog article from Prashant Raju.

The tooltip description of every program can be set with the .properties file:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/index.properties

Even if you’ll want to edit every message you can do it in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/mantle/messages/messages.properties
/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/mantleLogin/messages/ MantleLoginMessages.properties

Remember that every language has its sufix, for example the spanish files are ‘_es’ like messages_es.properties. And if you’re using special caracters you better make sure youre saving in UTF-8 coding (editor scren when you save).

13. Email account setup

The BI server can use a mail server if you have one set up already but in case you don’t get authorization to connect to it you can always send mail from the automated processes (ETL) using your mail acount. This is how I did it and we’ll review it with PDI.

The setup for the server is easy, if you know some parameters from your email server. Edit

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/smtp-email/email_config.xml

Put your data in:

<mail.smtp.host>[your.mail.ip.address]<mail.smtp.host>
<mail.userid>[your-user]</mail.userid>
<mail.password>[your-password]</mail.password>

We’ll test it with the pentaho designer,

14. Automatic startup

The correct way to do this is adding a user and group with a perfect defined user account, make scripts and placing them on the correct folders.

The fast track is based on the pentaho wiki like:

• Edit a file in a terminal/command window, type:
  sudo gedit /etc/init.d/pentaho
• Add this text (Important: Don’t forget to use YOUR user folder):
  case “$1” in
  start)
  /home/[your-user]/Pentaho/biserver-ce/start-pentaho.sh > /tmp/pentaho.out
  ;;
  stop)
  home/[your-user]/Pentaho/biserver-ce/stop-pentaho.sh
  ;;
  esac
  exit 0
• Save and exit. Then make the file executable:
  sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/pentaho
• update the boot scripts
  sudo update-rc.d pentaho defaults

You can restart your server.

Note: How to set up a tomcat pentaho windows service:

1. Open a terminal window as administrator.
   Click on start on exec, type cmd, right click on list, select run as admin
2. Change folder to your pentaho-tomcat excecutables:
   C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\bin
3. Register the service:
   tomcat6.exe //IS//Tomcat6 –DisplayName=”PentahoBIServer”
4. Start the configuration application:
   tomcat6w //ES//PentahoBIServer
5. On ‘Log On’ tab, select the windows user you used for the instalation or use another one that has ownership of the folder as some temporal files requires it.
6. On ‘java’ tab tipe:
   1. Virtual machine:
      C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_25\jre\bin\server\jvm.dll
      Classpath:
      C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\bin\bootstrap.jar CD:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\bin\tomcat-juli.jar
   2. On ‘java options’
      a. type (use your path):
      -Dcatalina.base=C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat      -Dcatalina.home=C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat      -Djava.endorsed.dirs=C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\endorsed      -XX:MaxPermSize=256m      -Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=3600000      -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=3600000      -Djava.io.tmpdir=C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\temp      -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager      -Djava.util.logging.config.file=C:\Pentaho\biserver-ce\tomcat\conf\logging.properties
      b. Initial memory pool:        512
      c. For max memory pool:  1024
      d. Thread stack size:          64
   3. On ‘startup’ tab:
      a. Class:           org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
      b. Arguments:  start
      c. Mode:           jvm
   4. On ‘shutdown’ tab:
      a. Class            org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
      b. Arguments   stop
      c. Mode           jvm
7. Apply and close the application
8. Use services.msc and change its properties to automatic start
9. Restart your PC-Server

15. Additional Notes

A. There are some errors in the console or logs (/tomcat/logs/) that are not really important, but you can get rid of one (sooner or later someone is going to ask about them): To avoid the “WARNING: Security role name PENTAHO_ADMIN used in an <auth-constraint> without being defined in a <security-role>”. Add before the security-constraint tag in:

/Pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml

add

<security-role>
   <description>security role</description>
   <role-name>PENTAHO_ADMIN</role-name>
</security-role>
<security-constraint>

That’s it. If you know something else to add, please let me know.

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