Alfresco

Download: pdf

Alfresco is a commercial grade document management software.

Setup in 10 minutes.

Contents

Install
Start Alfresco
Alfresco Setup
Errors
1. The store ‘avm://sitestore’ has a duplicate root node entry
2. Port already in use: 50501
References

Keywords: manage your documents via, web, openoffice, microsoft office, ftp, webdav, Afresco

This document describes document management software, if what you need is a processing/workflow software then you might want to try this workflow software

Lets get started. Please watch the first 2 videos in the "Reference Section"

Install

Java

Install Java.We will need it for Tomcat server.

apt-get update
apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Imagemagick

Imagemagick is a image converter

apt-get install imagemagick

xvfb

This program will allow openoffice to run in a command line under X11

apt-get install xvfb xfonts-base

Make sure you can start xvfb by typing

Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x768x24 -fbdir /usr/src &
or
Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x16 -fbdir /usr/src &

OpenOffice

Openoffice is used to convert to and from various file formats

apt-get install openoffice.org

After installing OpenOffice you should try to run Openoffice

soffice "-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager" -nofirststartwizard -nologo -headless -display:1 &

The first time openoffice runs it asks for registration. If an error occurs try disable the manual registration of OpenOffice.

Download Alfresco Labs 3 Stable (alfresco-labs-tomcat-3Stable.tar.gz)
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Labs_3_Final_download_files
untar it

tar -xzvf alfresco-labs-tomcat-3Stable.tar.gz

And put it in /opt/alfresco. When everything is working you can move it to a folder of your choice and double check it works in the new folder.

mkdir /opt/alfresco
cd /opt/alresco

mysql

* You should have mysql installed. If not install it

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-admin

Start Alfresco

Set #JAVA_HOME variable so alfresco knows where java is.

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

In the folder you have unpacked it run alfresco.sh

./alfresco.sh start

You should see:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/lucas/tmp/alfresco/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /home/lucas/tmp/alfresco/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/lucas/tmp/alfresco/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

Watch the logs to see if everything is going ok. You should see a spike in cpu usage for less then a minute.

tail -f ./alfresco.log

Open your web browser and check: http://localhost:8080/alfresco

Alfresco Is ready for You

You alfresco should be working.
You can login with username: admin, password: admin
We are done if you just wanted to check it out. If you want to continue, we will setup mysql, and get ready for production like setup.

Stop Alfresco

To shut down the service do. We need to configure few more things so please shut down for now.

./alfresco.sh stop

Setup Mysql

In the same alfresco folder you should see the following:

ls extras/databases/mysql/
db_remove.sql  db_setup.sql  libmysqltcl.dll  libmysqltcl.so

Then run the setupfile from alfresco. This will create user alfresco and give it necessary permissions.

mysql --user root -p < extras/databases/mysql/db_setup.sql

Now go back to main alfresco folder and change the following configuration.

vi tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-repository.properties

Edit custom-repository.properties where you need to comment out the lines relating to HSQL/Derby and uncomment the MySQL ones.

# Sample database connection properties
#
db.username=alfresco
db.password=alfresco
db.pool.initial=10
db.pool.max=100

and

db.driver=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver
db.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/alfresco

Change these setting to point to full path /opt/alfresco/alf_data

'./alf_data'. 'dir.root'

Change port settings,??

avm.rmi.service.port=50501
avmsync.rmi.service.port=50502
attribute.rmi.service.port=50503
authentication.rmi.service.port=50504
repo.rmi.service.port=50505
action.rmi.service.port=50506

Also, edit custom-hibernate-dialect.properties and uncomment mysql lines.

vi tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-hibernate-dialect.properties

You also need to download [mysql connector http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/5.0.html] and place it in ${TOMCAT_HOME}/lib/

setup imagemagick

Change the paths for imagemagick, and pdf2swf in alfresco conf files.

vi tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/repository.properties

Replace the corresponding lines with the following lines at the end of file:

img.root=/usr

swf.exe=/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf

setup samba

Modify the configuration for your samba settings: hostname, the domain and the broadcast address.

vi Alfresco/tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/file-servers.properties

setup init script

see http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Labs_3_Stable_on_Debian_Etch

Alfresco Setup

To start getting a picture of what alfresco does and how its treats its files see nodeservice

Definitions

Rules: "Rules are evaluated when certain events happen within the system. Typically, the events are inbound (content arrives into a space) or outbound (content leaves a space)." All the rules are evaluated, all conditions are met, and are acted on. For each event you have a condition (Items of a specified type or sub-type, filename), and action (Check in content, execute script, Send an email to specified users).

Alfresco important links

Main site: http://localhost:8080/alfresco
Alfresco Share: http://localhost:8080/share
Alfresco Server configurations: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Server_Configuration

Enable File Server CIFS

Your CIFS file server should be enabled by default.
Detail File Server Configuration Overview
The configuration file that handles the file system is the webapps file. The customize configuration is in shared folder.

#Standard Configuration
vi tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/file-servers.xml 

#Custom Settings
vi tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/file-servers-custom.xml

Enabled CIFS server is already in your file-servers.xml which should be set serverEnable enabled property to true in the CIFS Server section.
"Alfresco will use you server host name and append an _A to it and use that as the CIFS server name. If you want to change that, then modify the property host name, if you are not running any other cifs services (samba)"
Edit /etc/hosts and add alfresco name:

vi /etc/hosts
#Add a new line with your hostname_a, example:
127.0.1.1 delldebian delldebian_a

You should be able to access alfresco drives now.
Linux: smb://myhostname_a or authenticated: smb://admin:admin@myhostname_a/Alfresco
Windows: \\myhostname_a

If you want to add folder, you can login to webinterface, click create then create space.

FTP Server

Your ftp server can also be configured in the same file as CIFS server.
FTP server should be enabled by default. Try using gftp to log into the server,

address: hostname_a
username: admin
password: admin

Or use command line:

ftp myhostname_a
Connected to 192.168.xxx.xxx.
220 FTP server ready
Name (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:lucas): admin
331 User name okay, need password for admin
Password:
230 User logged in, proceed
Remote system type is UNIX.


ftp> ls
200 Port OK
150 File status okay, about to open data connection
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Dec 31  1969 Alfresco
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Dec 31  1969 AVM
226 Closing data connection


ftp> cd Alfresco
250 Requested file action OK

ftp> ls
200 Port OK
150 File status okay, about to open data connection
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Feb 13 01:03 Data Dictionary
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Feb 13 01:03 Guest Home
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Feb 13 01:03 User Homes
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Feb 13 01:03 Sites
drw-rw-rw-   1 user group 0 Feb 14 00:57 Documents
226 Closing data connection
ftp> quit

Record/Documents Management

We will go over setting up Records management.

Image Management

Alfresco and Apache

Add this to you apache configuration.

<IfDefine PROXY>
   ProxyPass         /alfresco  http://127.0.0.1:8080/alfresco
   ProxyPassReverse  /alfresco  http://127.0.0.1:8080/alfresco
 </IfDefine>

Errors

The store ‘avm://sitestore’ has a duplicate root node entry

If you get this error:

The store ‘avm://sitestore’ has a duplicate root node entry

Fix is to:

Edit /alfresco_root/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/customer-repository.properties file

Make sure dir.root points to absolute path, and that index recovery is set to auto.

dir.root=/opt/alfresco/alf_data
index.recovery.mode=AUTO

Delete alf_data/lucene-indexes folders

Port already in use: 50501

If you experienced problem like this:

09:19:22,266  ERROR [web.context.ContextLoader] Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.remoting.rmi.RmiServiceExporter' defined in class path resource [alfresco/emailserver/email-service-context.xml]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.rmi.server.ExportException: Port already in use: 50500; nested exception is:

It seems Tomcat has some of the libraries that are also included in the alfresco web app. The solution to a problem is to remove the libraries. The two libraries "jsp-2.0.jar" and "commons-el.jar" should be removed. On my installation I only had one of them.
Lets move the library to a tmp folder in case we need it later.

mv ./tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/lib/commons-el.jar /tmp/

Start alfresco and it should run now.