_Known issues

JBoss 5

There is an unfortunate issue, specifically when deploying under JBoss 5: you will need to remove the Xerces .jar from the Magnolia CMS webapps: if deploying using WAR files, you can remove it from the archive, or with the following Unix command zip -d path-to-magnolia.war WEB-INF/lib/xercesImpl-2.8.1.jar. If deploying using an exploded directory, simply remove the WEB-INF/lib/xercesImpl-2.8.1.jar file. See  Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.  for technical details. If you get exception messages such as org.jboss.xb.binding.JBossXBException: Failed to create a new SAX parser or java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.xerces.parsers.XIncludeAwareParserConfiguration, this is the issue you're hitting.

Weblogic 10

When deploying on Weblogic 10, there is a version conflict while using commons-lang. While Weblogic-10 is distributed with commons-lang-2.3.jar, JackRabbit and Magnolia CMS need at least commons-lang-2.4.jar. To resolve this issue, modify setDomainEnv.sh of Weblogic and add commons-lang-2.4.jar to the PRE_CLASSPATH. Since version 2.4 commons-lang doesn't remove any methods, but only adds new API and fixes known bugs, there is no adverse effect from this change to the Weblogic installation.

Mac OS X 10.5 - Leopard

If you use Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6, you should update to at least 10.5.8 or 10.6.2. Earlier versions cause issues where, when two or more instances are started in the same container, some or all connections are dropped.

The symptoms are that Tomcat is unreachable ("kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork:302") but no log message clearly identifies the issue. Sometimes pages can be loaded but resources cannot, leading to missing images or stylesheets. Another symptom is that you have to kill the Tomcat process to stop it (-HUP works) because the shutdown script cannot reach the running process either. See MAGNOLIA-1959 for more details and comment on your own experience.

Too many open files

This error can occur on some Linux systems when using the embedded Derby database. Derby opens several file handles and may run over the maximum limit set by the system.

The solution is to increase the limit. The exact procedure varies from one Linux distribution to the next. The following works on Ubuntu. For other systems see the Too many open files wiki page for tips.

To set a system wide limit for open files on Ubuntu Linux:

1. Find the current maximum number of open files per user in a single session: 
   ulimit -n 
   By default the number is 1024 which is too small.
2. Edit the limits.conf file: 
   sudo gedit /etc/security/limits.conf
3. Add the following lines to the file: 
   * soft nofile 10000 
* hard nofile 50000 
   This sets for all users a soft limit of 10000 open files and a hard limit of 50000. These are just example numbers. Set them according to your system needs. Note that the wildcard option applies only to regular users, not to superuser. If you run Magnolia CMS as superuser replace the asterisk with root.
4. Save the file.
5. Edit the configuration file for session-related modules: 
   sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/common-session
6. Add the following line to the file: 
   session required pam_limits.so
7. Save the file.
8. Restart Ubuntu.
9. Verify the new maximum number of open files: 
   ulimit -n 
   The command should now return 10000.

Session de-serialization

When installing or updating to a new version, you may see this error message:

2009-11-24 13:02:14,970 ERROR org.apache.catalina.session.ManagerBase : 
IOException while loading persisted sessions

This can be due to changes in signatures of classes that are stored in the user sessions (such as permissions, user, etc). The error happens when Tomcat attempts to de-serialize serialized sessions, that is when restarting the container.

This causes the loss of persisted sessions. Users will have to log in again. Otherwise it is a harmless error and can be ignored.

Xalan

If you see the following error message in your logs:

javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactoryConfigurationError: 
Provider org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl not found

Add the Xalan jar to the WEB-INF/lib folder of your Magnolia instances, delete the repositories and start again. Please see MAGNOLIA-1958 for more details and comment on your own experience.

Port 8080 is already in use

Port 8080 is the default port for Tomcat. You can see it at the end of the default address http://localhost:8080. If another application on the computer is already using the same port you may need to change it.

1. Open <CATALINA_HOME>/conf/server.xml in a text editor. This file is under your Magnolia CMS installation directory.

2. Find the following section and set the value of portto something other than 8080, for example 8090:

   <!-- Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
   <Connector port="8090" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
              maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75"
              enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100"
              connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" />
   

Change the defaultBaseUrl property which is used to generate links in emails or other external systems. To do this, you need to now access Magnolia at the new port 8090.

1. Log into the author instance at http://localhost:8090/magnoliaAuthor/.magnolia.
2. Go to Configuration.
3. Set the value of /server/defaultBaseUrl property to http://localhost:8090/magnolia/
4. Log into the public instance at http://localhost:8090/magnoliaPublic/.magnolia.
5. Go to Configuration.
6. Set the value of /server/defaultBaseUrl property to http://localhost:8090/magnolia/
   Now the Welcome page at http://localhost:8090 has the correct URLs too.

The port also needs to be changed in publishing configuration, otherwise activating changes from the author to public instance fails.

1. On the author instance, go to Configuration > Subscribers.
2. Under the magnoliaPublic8080 subscriber, set the URL property to http://localhost:8090/magnoliaPublic
3. Rename the subscriber to magnoliaPublic8090.
4. Activate the modified subscriber including its subnodes.

Windows Firewall is blocking Java

Allow an exception in Windows Firewall for Java.

1. Go to Control Panel > Windows Firewall.
2. Go to the Exceptions tab.
3. Click Add Program and browse to the java.exe file in the Java installation directory, for example C:\Sun\SDK\jdk\bin\java.exe.
4. Click OK.

If you get a security alert during startup, check the Private networks checkbox and click Allow access.

CATALINA_HOME environment variable is not defined

CATALINA_HOME environment variable identifies the Tomcat home directory, for example C:\Program Files\magnolia\apache-tomcat. Usually Magnolia CMS finds this directory automatically. When you type magnolia_control.bat start in the bin directory to start the system, a second script named startup.bat tries to find Tomcat home. It assumes that Tomcat home is one level above the bin directory where you issued the command, and sets the value of CATALINA_HOME to that directory.

C:\Program Files
    magnolia
        apache-tomcat   <-- Tomcat home directory
            bin         <-- magnolia_control.bat is here

However, if you added the bin directory to your PATH environment variable you can execute magnolia_control.bat from anywhere. This means startup.bat does not find Tomcat home directory by simply moving up one level from where you are and displays the following error:

To correct this define CATALINA_HOME in environment variables. Follow the instructions in Set JAVA_HOME environment variable.

Java out of memory

If the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) does not have enough memory you may see a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError in the startup log and Magnolia CMS fails to start.

Exception in thread "Timer-1" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at org.apache.jackrabbit.core.query.lucene.IndexingQueue.getFinishedDocuments

Increase Java heap size to allocate more memory to JVM:

1. Stop the server. 
   ./magnolia_control.sh stop
2. Open file /apache-tomcat/bin/setenv.sh (/apache-tomcat/bin/setenv.bat on Windows) in a text editor.
3. Edit the Xmx parameter to set a new maximum heap size. Default size for Magnolia CMS is 512M, try a higher amount such as 1024M.
4. Save the file and start the server. 
   ./magnolia_control.sh start && tail -f ../logs/catalina.out

JAR file does not start

When installing the Enterprise Edition on Windows, you can start the installer by double-clicking the JAR file. If this does not work there is a chance that some application on your system has registered the .jar extension.

You can try to fix it yourself by restoring the association of the .jar extension with the javaw.exe executable. .Right-click the JAR file and select Open With. Typically the javaw.exe file is in C:\Program Files (x86)\java\jre6\bin). Alternatively, start the installer from a command prompt with the following command: java -jar magnolia-enterprise-installer-x.y.z.jar. Make sure the file extension is .jar. Internet Explorer has a tendency to append or change it to .zip.