Running Pentaho BI Server behind a proxy

To whom it may concern - a quick hands-on guide for running the Pentaho BI server behind a proxy

Prerequisites

This post assumes you're running Ubuntu linux (or at least a Debian) and that you have both the apache Httpd server as well as the Pentaho BI server installed.

Apache HTTP Server

If you haven't got apache installed, this is your line:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2

You can then control the apache2 Http server using the apaceh2ctl script. For instance, to start it, do:

$ sudo apache2ctl start

Once it's started you can navigate to its homepage to verify that it is running:

http://localhost/

You can stop it by running

$ sudo apache2ctl stop

If you're changing apache's configuration, you need to restart it to allow changes to take effect using this command:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

Java

Pentaho relies on Java. If not installed already you can get it like this:

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Pentaho BI Server

If you haven't got the Pentaho BI Server, download the latest version from sourceforge, and unpack the archive in some location you find convenient. (For development purposes I simply keep and run it in a subdirectory of my home directory)

You can start the pentaho BI Server by cd-ing into the biserver-ce directory and then run:

$ ./start-pentaho.sh

You can then navigate to its homepage:

http://localhost:8080/pentaho/Home

(Simply navigating to http://localhost:8080 will automatically redirect you there too).

It can be useful to monitor the log while it's running:

$ tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out

If you want to change something in Pentaho's configuration, you need to stop the server and then restart it. This is done by running:

$ ./stop-pentaho.sh

Configuring Proxy support for Apache

Boris Kuzmanovic wrote an excellent post to setting up proxy support for Apache. My summary (and adjustment) follows below.

First, change the apache configuration to load the required proxy modules:

$ sudo a2enmod proxy
$ sudo a2enmod proxy_http

Then, edit any site definitions to use the proxy. I just modified the default site definition:

$ sudo geany /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Inside the <VirtualHost> section, I added these snippets immediately above the </VirtualHost> that ends the section:

    <Location /pentaho/>
      ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
      ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
      SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    </Location>

    <Location /pentaho-style/>
      ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
      ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
      SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    </Location>

After making these changes, we need to restart apache:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

These two <Location> directives are now effectively tunneled to the respective locations on the Pentaho BI Server, and vice versa, the response is passed back.

Using mod_proxy_ajp instead of proxy_http

While the regular HTTP proxy simply works, there is a better, more thightly integrated solution. The regular HTTP proxy basically handles HTTP requests received by the Apache Httpd server by sending a new, equivalent HTTP request, through to the tomcat server. Likewise, Tomcat's HTTP response is then send back as a new equivalent HTTP response to the source of the original, initial request.

So, that's twice a transport over HTTP.

Things can be improved by routing the incoming HTTP request to the tomcat server using a binary protocol called the AJP (Apache JServ) protocol. (For a detailed comparison, see this excellent comparison between HTTP/HTTPS and AJP.)

Fortunately, the steps to setup an AJP proxy are almost identical to those for setting up a regular HTTP proxy. First, enable the ajp proxy module:

$ sudo a2enmod proxy
$ sudo a2enmod proxy_ajp

(Note that the proxy module was already enabled as part of setting up the regular http proxy. The line is repeated here for completeness, but not necessary if you completed the steps for setting up support for the regular http proxy. You can enable either or both the proxy_http and the proxy_ajp modules, and both require the proxy module.)

Then, we edit again the site configuration to use the proxy. Since the locations /pentaho/ and /pentaho-style/ were already used, we first comment those out:

    #<Location /pentaho/>
    #  ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
    #  ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho/
    #  SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    #</Location>

    #<Location /pentaho-style/>
    #  ProxyPass http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
    #  ProxyPassReverse http://localhost:8080/pentaho-style/
    #  SetEnv proxy-chain-auth
    #</Location>

Then we add equivalent lines going via the AJP proxy:

    ProxyPass /pentaho ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho
    ProxyPassReverse /pentaho ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho

    ProxyPass /pentaho-style ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho-style
    ProxyPassReverse /pentaho-style ajp://localhost:8009/pentaho-style

(The bit that goes ajp://localhost:8009 refers to the ajp service that is running on port 8009 of tomcat by default.)

Again we have to restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo apache2ctl restart

.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Paul Stöllberger, Pedro Alves and Tom Barber for valuable feedback and background information regarding AJP.

Why webdevelopers should use Linux

Recently, I revamped my old Organization Chart javascript widget to a new version. Since I released this code some time ago I received quite a good deal of email requests from people that are actually using it for their company's intranet site.

On the one hand, it makes me very happy to see people are actually using it for professional purposes. On the other hand, at the time I slapped it together in a few hours total, building on some old experience. As it turned out, users were/are having quite some issues to properly customize their organization charts. I even received some code contributions to improve the functionality.

Now, a few days ago, I finally found some time to address the major issues. But something grave changed in the mean while. When I first created and released the widget, I was a windows user, and used to create stuff that would work on Microsoft Internet Explorer, and then modify it to work on Mozilla/Firefox. Now, it has been about a year since I replaced Microsoft Windows for (K)Ubuntu Linux. Meaning, I am without Internet Explorer....or am I ;)

Enter IEs4Linux:



The IE4sLinux project offers the real, genuine Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer as a Wine emulation:



One of the compelling things about the IE4Linux project is that it allows you to run several versions of MS Internet Explorer on the same machine - something I never got to work on my native windows machine.

Obviously, web developers that need to test their pages on several browsers and browser versions are better off on Linux + Wine than native Windows, as Linux + Wine + IEs4Linux allows them to test their pages on several versions of Internet Explorer.

Thanks to the people from IEs4Linux and Wine!