The Pocket Site

There are some quite specific cases where it is desirable to have OpenOffice.org run in headless mode on servers, mainly for document conversion. But typically its a bit harder to make that convenient. There are a few places that provide ways to start that and a couple of init scripts, but nothing with much polish. Hopefully the following script will fill that gap for some…

Combined from scripts and tips found at the following pages…

http://chrisschuld.com/2008/10/rhel5-init-initd-script-for-openoffice-org/

https://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/wiki/OpenOfficeConverter

http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts

#!/bin/bash
# openoffice.org  headless server script
#
# chkconfig: 2345 80 30
# description: headless openoffice server script
# processname: openoffice
#
# Author: Vic Vijayakumar
# Modified by Federico Ch. Tomasczik
# Lsb + compatibility for rhel and debian added by Glenn Enright
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          openoffice-headless
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: Manage openoffice document conversion daemon
# Description:       Enable service provided by daemon.
### END INIT INFO
 
[ -e /etc/init.d/functions ] && . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
 
OOo_HOME=/usr/bin
SOFFICE_PATH=$OOo_HOME/soffice
PIDFILE=/var/run/openoffice-server.pid
 
set -e
 
function start {
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
echo "OpenOffice headless server has already started."
return
fi
echo "Starting OpenOffice headless server"
$SOFFICE_PATH -headless -nologo -nofirststartwizard -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp" &> /dev/null 2>&1
touch $PIDFILE
}
 
function stop {
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
echo "Stopping OpenOffice headless server."
killall -9 soffice &&; killall -9 soffice.bin
rm -f $PIDFILE
return
fi
echo "Openoffice headless server is not running."
}
 
case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
stop
echo "Pausing a moment to allow full shutdown" && sleep 5
start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

Reposted for posterity, sorry lost the source link…

echo "
# miniDLNA upstart script
#
# This task runs miniDLNA.  it's currently a work in progress
 
description     "miniDLNA start-up script"
author          "Craig Chambers"
 
start on (net-device-up IFACE=eth0)
 
expect fork
 
respawn
exec /usr/local/sbin/minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf
" >  /etc/init/minidlna.conf

Ubuntu 9.04 bug with networking directory creation « RimuHosting Blog.

I ran ifup and got the following errors
root@charon ~ # ifup eth0
ifup: failed to open statefile /var/run/network/ifstate: No such file or directory
… so i checked and /var/run/network did not exist… This link had a bit more technical information. They said look for  the following files and remove them.
/etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules
/lib/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules

A good solution to a tricky issue after an major upgrade.

While I am a big fan of Ubuntu and I use it regularly on my desktop, its fair to say that I prefer not to use it for server installations. The same things goes for Fedora. Actually just don’t use Fedora . Silly bugs like those above are one of the reasons.

If I had to make a recommendation, it would be for Debian stable or CentOS/RHEL. Both are reasonably easy to use, with great community support. And I find they have a much more more consistent toolchain so that things are less likely to break and are better testing before getting into production systems. Keeping in mind this is for a server.

Mind you, no distro is 100% perfect, and some needs will differ. All YMMV and IMHO

To upgrade in place for releases that are no longer officially supported please see…
http://www.nzlinux.com/2009/06/upgrading-older-releases-of-ubuntu-when-support-ends/

Depending on the installation it might be substantially faster to do a clean reinstall and migrate your content from backups. YMMV.

If you are already on one of the LTS releases then there should be a safe upgrade path available per https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes

Canonical and analyst firm RedMonk released findings of a survey sent to thousands of Ubuntu Server users. It was developed with the Ubuntu community and was completed by almost 7,000 respondents. The companies says the survey confirmed that Ubuntu was being widely used in the most common workloads (web, print, file, database and mail servers) and that it is considered mission critical by most respondents.

via Canonical and RedMonk release survey on Ubuntu Server Usage.

You can grab the review results directly from here

Update: I found an interesting comparision betweem Ubuntu and Windows performance. The author plainly states they are a Linux proponent, but tries to give a fair comparision.