JBoss Clustering installation issues

At a recent JUG, Matt Quinlan dropped by to show off JBoss' clustering capabilities. Really neat stuff: just enable the clustering, start the servers, and run. It doesn't install that way in the real world, but golly, it works.

Matt showed off a drop-and-run demo, basically loading JBoss on a thumb drive, loading it on a set of laptops (unfortunately, mine was at home - and I would have wanted my Sparc laptop there in any case, and I don't normally travel with that puppy.) The demo itself went flawlessly, really impressive stuff, and Matt discussed a number of issues around clustering that actually made sense. He was a bit frenetic, but very sensible. Good on you, mate.

However, since I was all inspirationalizationed, I went out the next morning and installed JBoss 4.0.4.GA on my Sparc and my working laptop. I installed the "clustered ejb3" package, because that's what I wanted (duhhrrrr), and cranked it up... only to see various failures on clustering. Not really big failures, they were pretty silent... but no clustering. The problem was that I didn't have a farm-service.xml. Easy enough to fix, right? Just create one!

Well, no. "Just create one" ignores the reality of the mechanism; just creating one doesn't work. I looked up the clustering documentation, only to find an incomplete XML file - using it doesn't work. I ended up searching high and low to find a complete example, wasted an hour or so doing it, and I'm still lost as to why it's either not part of the installation process or - at the very least - the documentation doesn't show a complete workable configuration file. (If you need the farm-service.xml, mail me and I'll send it to you. If enough people do it, I'll post it on a server for you to download.)

It's really neat stuff, though: it really is very simple to create a working cluster. It's a great way to find out if frameworks have a problem with being set as distributable. :)

tags: documentation  jboss  distributable  cluster