Quick tips to troubleshoot the first installation of Pentaho BI 5.0.1 CE with MySQL

posted on 03/25/2014 by | 4 Comments

Last week, I successfully installed Pentaho BI Server Community Edition. It wasn’t as easy as I expected. I did follow a really good tutorial from David Fombella at http://anonymousbi.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/pentaho-bi-server-5-0-1ce-mysql-installation-guide/  Like many people, I did have the famous 404 error. It’s not a big deal, there is no error that can’t be explained with the log files, right ?

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Consider the following as an extension of the tutorial

Tip #1

Be careful at step #5 and don’t forget to delete tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/pentaho.xml . Keep in mind that every time you modify tomcat/webapps/pentaho/META-INF/context.xml, pentaho.xml has to be deleted because it’s an exact copy of context.xml.

Tip #2

Don’t copy/paste the configuration provided in the tutorial for pentaho-solutions/system/jackrabbit/repository.xml  (Step #6) because the CLASS attribute of the all the nodes is missing ! The XML file already has examples that you can copy past with all the nodes and the proper attributes.

Pentaho.xml is not the only config file that is duplicated. I spent HOURS searching the node with the missing class attribute  in JackRabbits’s repository.xml (yup, I did copy paste from the tutorial..). I ended up reverting all my modifications and I still had the missing class error in the log file, over and over.  The fact is: if you do start pentaho with the missing class attribute in repository.xml, it will create a folder named pentaho-solutions/system/jackrabbit/repository/ which seems to have generated/copied files based on the configuration. The problem is it generates a file with a missing class attribute ! It took me too long to realize pentaho-solutions/system/jackrabbit/repository/ IS NOT PART OF THE DEFAULT INSTALLATION. It’s generated. If you screw up the config like me, DELETE THE ENTIRE FOLDER.

Tip #3

Another thing you have to know is about the folders tomcat/work/Catalina and tomcat/temp. Both folders contain temporary file that can be removed. But the folders themselves must exist! For an unknown reason, my tomcat/temp folder was missing and that prevents Jackrabbit to start properly with the not-so-useful error:

Finally

So, if you are getting problems with the installation like many people, including myself have, just execute this every time you change a config file. It will allow to start with a clean environment.

I hope it could save you time !

Oh! One last thing..don’t try to run it on a 1Gb RAM server.. it won’t work. :)

 

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