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My multicore Solr on Ubuntu 10.04 has proven to be one of my most popular posts yet.  Seeing the success of that post I decided it was time to show how to get the latest version of Solr up and running on Ubuntu 10.04.  As of this writing the latest version of Solr is 3.4.0.

Before we get started you should read and follow my previous post because I borrow all of the config settings from Ubuntu’s Solr 1.4 packages.  The default config settings from the Ubuntu maintainers is still a decent starting point with Solr 3.4.  Once finished you can safely remove the old Solr 1.4 package if you want to.

With a working Solr 1.4 installation in place, we can get started on getting Solr 3.4 running.  You can change some of the following paths if you want, just remember to change them in all of the appropriate places.  Everything you’re about to see should be done as the root user.

Create some required paths

mkdir /usr/local/share/solr3
mkdir /usr/local/etc/solr3
mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/solr3/data

Next, re-own the data dir to the proper user

chown -R tomcat6.tomcat6 /usr/local/lib/solr3/data

Download the latest version of Solr

You can get the latest version of Solr from http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ and extract the files into root’s home directory.

wget http://mirrors.axint.net/apache//lucene/solr/<version>/apache-solr-<version>.tgz
tar zxvf apache-solr-<version>tgz

Extract the war Solr war file

Extract the Solr war file into a location.  You may need to install the unzip utility with apt-get install unzip.

cd /usr/local/share/solr3 
unzip /root/apache-solr-<version>/dist/apache-solr-<version>.war

Install additional libs

There are a few other libs included with the Solr distribution.  You can install anything else you need, I specifically need to have the dataimporthandler add ons.

cp /root/apache-solr-3.4.0/dist/apache-solr-dataimporthandler-* WEB-INF/lib/

Configure Multicore

If you want to have multicore enabled you’ll need to perform the following actions.  The rest of this post assumes you have copied this file and will require you to make some changes to support multicore.  I’ve marked steps that can be skipped if you also wish to skip the multicore functionality.

Copy in the multicore config file:

cp /root/apache-solr-3.4.0/example/multicore/solr.xml .

You should now edit the solr.xml file at this point, doing the following:

  • Set persistent to true
  • Remove entries for core0 and core1

Next, change the ownership and permissions so that tomcat is able to modify this file when needed

chown tomcat6.tomcat6 /usr/local/share/solr3
chown tomcat6.tomcat6 /usr/local/share/solr3/solr.xml

Copy existing config files

This is where we’re going to borrow some files from Ubuntu’s Solr package maintainer.

cd /usr/local/etc/solr3
cp -av /etc/solr/* .

Because we simply copied the config files we need to modify them to fit our new environment.  Change the following in the solr-tomcat.xml file:

  • Change docBase to /usr/local/share/solr3
  • Change Environment value to /usr/local/share/solr3

Also edit tomcat.policy file changing:

  • Modify all entries referencing solr to point to appropriate /usr/local location

Change the following in conf/solrconfig.xml:

  • Change <dataDir> to /usr/local/lib/solr3/data

If you are using multicore and you followed the Solr 1.4 multicore post you’ll have a conftemplate directory and you’ll need make changes to conftemplate/solrconfig.xml

  • Change <dataDir> to /usr/local/lib/solr3/data/CORENAME

Create symlinks

Here we’ll create some symlinks to support the way Ubuntu packages Solr.  This is necessary because we copied Ubuntu’s config files and those files reference a few locations.  Creating the symlinks also allows us to continue using the scripts created in the previous post with minimal modifications.

  • cd /usr/local/share/solr3
  • ln -s /usr/local/etc/solr3/conf
  • ln -s /usr/local/etc/solr3/ /etc/solr3
  • ln -s /usr/local/lib/solr3 /var/lib/solr3

Enable/Start the new Solr instance

We can now enable our new Solr 3.4 instance in tomcat by doing the following:

cd /etc/tomcat6/Catalina/localhost
ln -s /usr/local/etc/solr3/solr-tomcat.xml solr3.xml

Note that the name of the symlink is important as it will define where we find this instance (/solr vs /solr3).  At this point you can create a new core.  I’ve provided the updated scripts here.

 

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I’m not going to lie.  I think OS X Lion 10.7.0 is a buggy release.  Is it buggier than some other releases of OS X?  Possibly.  Can Apple fix the bugs, most certainly.  But bugs aside, there a few design decisions Apple made that don’t seem fully baked.

First, lets touch on some of the bugs I’ve noticed so far.

Finder is one of those things in OS X that is almost universally disliked for one reason or another.  Finder in Lion has a new feature where it just stops doing things at all.  At times disk usage stops being updated and it won’t actually copy files.  While a restart of Finder resolves this issue, it’s odd that it is there at all.

Wi-Fi, formerly known as AirPort, has a strange tendency to just not connect after resuming from sleep.  That said, when it is connected I find it to be more reliable with more stable throughput.

Launchpad, the iOS like view of your installed applications has a tendency at times to lag heavily when launching an app.

There are a number of other smaller bugs that exist in Lion that are a bit grating but I have faith that Apple will fix them in short order.  Leopard was initially, at least in my opinion, unusable after the initial installation and I found myself going back to Tiger a couple of times.  Apple fixed those issues and then some.

But what really gets me are the things Apple will probably never fixed because they are working as designed and my real issue is that I don’t like the design.  Gestures for one are a cluster.  Many were changed from Snow Leopard and worse is that a good number of them contradict what a person would have learned.  Four finger swipe up now produces mission control rather than show desktop.  The show desktop gesture has now been replaced by a more awkward five finger gesture.  All in all, I spent the most time tweaking gesture settings on Lion than anything else after install.  Between the available options in System Preferences and BetterTouchTool I think I have things where I want them.

More annoying than the gestures is the addition of “natural scrolling.”  Natural scrolling reverses the scrolling direction when using the mouse wheel so that to scroll the page down you pull your fingers down on the trackpad or mouse.  The naming of this option is also interesting because unchecking the natural scrolling option says to the user they are about to enable something that is less natural.  I don’t think this could be further from the truth.  Like flying a plane, it’s natural for your body to want to push the stick forward to cause the plane to pitch down, but you push left or right to pitch left or right.  Natural scrolling makes complete sense on touch device where it is more like you are pushing a sheet of paper around.  At any rate, my issue comes in when you disable natural scrolling.  Not only does it reverse scrolling but it also reverses the direction used for changing spaces.  With natural scrolling off, using four fingers left causes you to go to the space on the left and four fingers right brings the space on the right into view.  In writing this makes sense, but in practice it feels awkward.

Lion also lacks the kind of polish I’ve come to expect from OS X.  Parts of it down right ugly.  Mail.app for example has a new layout which is great except for the hideous message count badging, shown below:

 

There is just something about the numbers that make them appear to be off in some fashion.

The boot process, at least what you see on screen, has been revamped some and I can’t help but feel that it all looks very clunky.  While the fading and moving the Apple logo from the center of the screen to above the list of users on the login screen is very clever, the steps required to move from boot splash to getting this animation setup is jarring.  The boot process basically boils down to showing the typical boot splash screen with the Apple logo which is then replaced with an image that looks the same and is ultimately used during the final animation that reveals the available users.  This transition just isn’t the kind of smooth and elegant thing a person would expect from Apple.  Couple that with the sometimes jarring color correction applied just prior to the animation effect and you have what is in my eyes a really poorly done boot sequence.  The shutdown process is also odd in that the desktop goes way and is covered with a plain gray screen.  The blue screen used in previous releases was much better and if it had to be replaced at all it should have been replaced with black.

All that said, there is a lot to like about Lion.  I find the autocorrect to be a fine addition.  I like Mission Control a lot, resume is a great feature, Mail.app’s new layout is superb and the refinements to iCal and Contacts are welcome.  I know Apple will fix the real bugs in the software but I can only hope they provide better System Preference options for customizing gestures.

I’m also surprised that none of the reviews I read seemed to point out the shortcomings of Lion and gave it glowing reviews.  As I said, there is a lot to like but it certainly isn’t perfect and I think Apple deserves to hear about it.  Lion isn’t Apple’s Vista by any means, but it’s obvious to me that Jobs had less input in this release than previous releases.

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“Huang gave a number of reasons why the first Honeycomb-powered tablets haven’t had a strong start. Specifically with regard to the Xoom, he said the initial model introduced should not have included 3G, and should have been a Wi-Fi-only option.

“It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It’s a price point problem,” he reportedly said, adding: “And it’s a software richness of content problem.””

You don’t say – Source

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World IPv6 Day is fast approaching and it’s far easier to configure IPv6 than I knew, even if your ISP doesn’t provide you with IPv6 addresses.

That said, there are a few things you need in place before you get started.

  • A working internet connection
  • Either be connected directly to the internet (your host needs a public IP) or be using something other than an off the shelf broadband router.

If you mean the above requirements then simply head over to http://www.tunnelbroker.net/ and register for an account.

Once registered and logged in perform the following:

  • Click “Create Regular Tunnel” under User Functions.
  • Copy and paste the “You are viewing from:” IP address into the form field above
  • Choose the tunnel server closest to you
  • Click “Create Tunnel”
  • Once created, click on the Example Configuration tab and follow the example config options for your system

That’s it. You should now be able to access IPv6 enabled sites like ipv6.google.com and www.v6.facebook.com. On June 18, 2011 a number of large sites will be adding AAAA records for their main addresses (www.facebook.com for example) which has the potential to break connectivity for users who have an improper IPv6 setup. The best option is to be prepared for the day by ensuring you’re accessing the Internet using IPv6. You can also test your connection (with or without IPv6 enabled) at http://test-ipv6.com/.

In a future post, I’ll detail how to use this same tunnel broker service to create a Linux based IPv6 router and firewall. IPv6 will work very differently from IPv4 in how addresses are assigned to you the end user. In short, every device in your home in the future will have a public Internet address meaning steps must be taken to ensure devices inside your home are protected with a firewall.

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From Crunchgear

He cited sales “cheaper” smartphones like the the $49 iPhone 3GS as the primary reason for the lackluster performance.

It isn’t the $49 iPhone 3GS that is killing your tablet’s, it’s the lackluster performance. The Xoom is a dog and if it wasn’t for the badge at boot that proudly boasts there is a dual-core processor inside I would have never known.