Hi all!

I've been fighting with this for days. I've followed several peices of advice I've found around the site but I just can't seem to get social office to use my mysql database.
Social Office runs just fine, I can get in and do whatever I want...but nothing ever happens with the mysql db.
Here's where I stand right now:

I have a portal-ext.properties file located in the /tomcat-6.0.18 and in the /tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes directories with the following info:

# MySQL
#
jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/admin_colegionoffice?useUnicode=true&characterEn- coding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=my username

jdbc.default.password=mypass


mail.session.mail.pop3.host=mail.colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.pop3.password=mypass
mail.session.mail.pop3.port=110
mail.session.mail.pop3.user=admin@colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.smtp.auth=false
mail.session.mail.smtp.host=mail.colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.smtp.password=mypass
mail.session.mail.smtp.port=25
mail.session.mail.smtp.user=admin@colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.store.protocol=pop3
mail.session.mail.transport.protocol=smtp

I've changed jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/admin_colegionoffice? to show the name of my mysql db instead of lportal?...

After having set that up...nothing happened...the server still starts but it never outputs anything about mysql..this is what I get when the server starts:

Using CATALINA_BASE: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/local/jdk1.7.0

So...then I followed some other instructions to unpack the portal-impl.jar and edit the portal.properties file. I did so, commenting out the hypersonic section and uncommenting the mysql, adding my info to it. this is what the relevant portion of portal.properties looks like now. I made no other changes to this file.

#
# Hypersonic
#
#jdbc.default.driverClassName=org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver
#jdbc.default.url=jdbc:hsqldb:${liferay.home}/data/hsql/lportal
#jdbc.default.username=sa
#jdbc.default.password=

#
# Ingres
#
#jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.ingres.jdbc.IngresDriver
#jdbc.default.url=jdbc:ingres://localhost:II7/lportal
#jdbc.default.username=
#jdbc.default.password=

#
# MySQL
#
jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/admin_colegionoffice?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=admin_colegionoffice
jdbc.default.password=mypass
#
# Oracle
#
#jdbc.default.driverClassName=oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
#jdbc.default.url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:xe
#jdbc.default.username=lportal
#jdbc.default.password=lportal

I properly updated the jar file with my new portal.properties file using the jar uf command...no errors here and I've verified that the jar file contains my updated portal.properties file.

I have a properly created mysql database in utf-8 format. Also, I have tried all these things using lportal in the jdbc connection instead of my actual database name.

So, after all this I still just get the basic output of:
Using CATALINA_BASE: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/local/jdk1.7.0

whenever I restart tomcat using ./startup.sh.

Any help would be appreciated, I'm on a deadline to get this done. Once I've got it running on the mysql database I'll be good to go.

Thanks much!

Michael Smith

Addendum...after having done all that and restarting tomcat, I now get an apache tomcat 404 error when attempting to get to my social office installation.

You should only need the portal-ext.properties in /tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes

Also do you have the MySQL driver jar in /tomcat-6.0.18/lib/ext ?

hi Bryan, thanks for getting back to me on this.

I do in fact have the mysql.jar in /tomcat-6.0.18/lib/ext. I just checked.

at this point I've replaced the portal-impl.jar file with the stock file provided by liferay. so that's clean and original now.

I still have the portal-ext.properties file in the two locations I mentioned previously...tomcat root folder and /tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes.

here is my portal-ext.properties file from the /tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes directory.
# MySQL
#
schema.run.enabled=true
schema.run.minimal=true

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/admin_colegionoffice?useUnicode=true&characterEn- coding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=admin_colegionoffice
jdbc.default.password=mypass


mail.session.mail.pop3.host=mail.colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.pop3.password=mypass
mail.session.mail.pop3.port=110
mail.session.mail.pop3.user=admin@colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.smtp.auth=false
mail.session.mail.smtp.host=mail.colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.smtp.password=mypass
mail.session.mail.smtp.port=25
mail.session.mail.smtp.user=admin@colegionoffice.org
mail.session.mail.store.protocol=pop3
mail.session.mail.transport.protocol=smtp

I just shutdown the server and started it up again.
Using CATALINA_BASE: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_HOME: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /var/www/vhosts/colegionoffice.org/colegionoffice/tomcat-6.0.18/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/local/jdk1.7.0


still no mention of mysql and I still get a 404 error. http://colegionoffice.org:8080 the 404 came about after adding the portal-ext.properties files. before I put those in everything was working beautifully.

Any further help would be greatly appreciated. my organization fell in love your software and gave me a week to get it all running and ready for full scale use.

Michael Smith

Ok I got it working. I got smart and checked the catalina.out log file. Looks like my db username was being truncated down to admin_colegionoff....so I changed the username to something small and it all fire up. still didn't get any kind of output from start up but the catalina.out log looks good except for a few duplicate entry errors.

The css is totally broken though...why does that happen? and how can I fix it quickly? up till now I've had to resort to reinstalling SO every time it happens.
I get that quite often on different machines when I make changes, the styling completely vanishes and I'm left with several unordered lists...

so, for anyone else reading this. You only need the portal-ext.properties in /tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes

be sure to add
schema.run.enabled=true
schema.run.minimal=true

to the portal-ext.properties

and keep your db usernames short!

Thanks again for the help Bryan.

Hi Michael,

There's a known issue with the CSS; you can find other threads about it in this forum. Sorry about that.

It's been fixed in 1.6 EE, which you can get on a trial basis, or you can wait for 2.0 CE, which will be made available in Q4 of this year. But since you've indicated you're under time pressure you may have to have a go at fixing it using the suggestions given in the other threads.