Supercontainer standalone on port 80

[mcyrulik]

Hello everybody,

We purchased a copy of SuperContainer and so far it is better than we could have imagined. We are however, running into an issue.

The websites that are going to use this functionality need to be accessed by our customers. These customers are using proxy servers and firewalls, and blocking port 8020. In talking to the IT department at these customers, the only port that they will allow is port 80.

Right now we have SuperContainer running on the same machine as our web server, which is an Apple Xserve.

The question is: Is it possible to run the standalone version of SuperContainer, and have it listen on port 80. We need the standalone version so that it will generate thumbnails of files that are uploaded. If not, is there another way to run SuperContainer where it will listen on port 80, and not disrupt the normal web server operation?

As a last resort, we may be able to have SuperContainer run by itself on another machine, as along as it it able to listen on port 80, and automatically generate thumbnails.

Thanks, Any thoughts or questions are greatly appreciated.

~Mark

[John May - Point In Space]

You can't have two services - SuperContainer and the web server - operating on the same port. You would need to assign a different port to one or the other - assumedly SuperContainer.

- John

[mcyrulik]

So, If I am understanding you correctly, If I set up another machine - separate from the machine it is on now, I could run SuperContainer on port 80, as long as there was no webserver running?

[John May - Point In Space]

Sure - though I don't understand why you wouldn't just run it on the same machine on a different port.

- John

[mcyrulik]

A few of our customers that need to use this site have just about all their ports blocked incoming and outgoing, plus a proxy server. according to their firewall manager, they allow traffic on 80 for http, plus a few for mail(routed directly to their mail server, and a few application specific ones, which are all routed to specific machines inside their network. If I can't get them to allow traffic out of their network on any other ports, what other options do I have?

[John May - Point In Space]

You could assign a second IP to the server, then have the web server run on one IP and SuperContainer on the other. Then, both could run on port 80 on the same hardware (but not on the same IP).

- John

[mcyrulik]

That's makes a ton of sense. How do I tell supercontainer to listen on a different IP address? I don't see that in the settings/options

We already have a few IP addresses set up on the Xserve already. When we set up the other IP addresses on that machine, we had to go into the Server admin, and add a site that listened on that address. If we add another IP, how do we set that up so that apcache won't intercept port 80 requests on that IP? is it as simple as not setting up a site to listen on that ip?

Thank you for all your help so far!!

~Mark

[John May - Point In Space]

Yeap - just don't configure the IP in any sites in Server Admin and it should leave it alone.

- John

[mcyrulik]

So what about changing the IP supercontainer listens on? right now it defaults to the first IP it comes to. Is there a way to set that?

~Mark

[John May - Point In Space]

Hmm, you'd need to ask the 360Works folks about that one. I'm sure they can provide an answer quickly - they've always been great in my experiences with them.

- John

[mcyrulik]

Just to update this thread with what I found.

SuperContainer in standalone mode does not allow you to specify an IP address for it to listen on.

The port 80 adventure was a different story. From the documentation, the tomcat version or the filemaker CWP installer will redirect requests to SuperContainer on port 80 properly.

For the standalone version on an Xserve, you have to run the .jar file as root because on linux based OS's(and Mac OSX is a linux based OS), the system does not allow non-root users to bind to ports below 1024.

to get around this, you can run SC as root by running the following from the command line:

sudo java -jar /SuperContainerServer.jar

Hope this can help someone else!

[John May - Point In Space]

You may still have an option here. We run SuperContainer on our shared servers as separate Tomcat instances, one per client. These are not the "standalone" version that 360Works provides, but rather Tomcat installs we do from scratch with the SuperContainer files loaded into them.

If you were to do the same, I believe you could configure Tomcat to only listen on a specific IP, on port 80. You probably would still need to run as root, but there even may be a way to get around such, as I know there are some ways to launch processes as root to satisfy OS X's requirement, then switch to running as a different user.

- John

[mcyrulik]

If we were to run your version of the standalone, would Supercontainer still be able to generate thumbnail images of documents(where applicable)?

[John May - Point In Space]

Yeap, it would run just the same as the 360Works provided stand-alone. Their stand-alone is basically just a Tomcat binary all wrapped up nice for you.

- John

[mcyrulik]

I'm pretty sure that I understand what you are talking about with separate tomcat instances. but I would have no idea how to set that up on our server.

At this point, I know we have an extra Mac Pro G5 laying around, so it looks like the route we are going to take is just to set that up as a SuperContainer server, and just let it crunch files all day long.

Thank you so much for your input.

~Mark

[John May - Point In Space]

Just for the record, a "tomcat on os x" search should turn up plenty on how to install. Then you just place the /SuperContainer/ directory in the /webapps/ directory.

- John

[wbr]

It should be mentioned that you can easily solve the OP's problem with an Apache Reverse Proxy on OS X.

Run Supercontainer on the same machine as Filemaker Server and Apache. Make sure the proxy module(s) are installed in your Apache config. Then edit your httpd.conf file (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf) with a couple of lines to reverse-proxy all requests coming in to Supercontainer.

ProxyPass /SuperContainer http://localhost:8020/SuperContainer

ProxyPassReverse /SuperContainer http://localhost:8020/SuperContainer

This allows you to run Supercontainer transparently within the same domain namespace as your main Filemaker/Web server and without having to fuss with ports in your Supercontainer URLs.

http://myserver.com/SuperContainer/Files/some/path/to/a/document

All requests incoming to myserver.com/Supercontainer will be reverse proxied to the real Supercontainer on port 8020. You don't need a second server, you don't need to mess with Tomcat, and you don't need to mess with port configurations.