Hard to find a place in the SunONE

As the TIBCO Portal doesn't support Tomcat in a production installation, we are using SunONE 6.1 SP4 as the web container.

Getting SunONE to install with the portal has been frought with difficulty. What we had wanted to do was to install SunONE on port 80. We want port 80 since the infrastructure already allows access to this port in the demo rooms.

After much work, we discovered that it is basically not possible to install the web server in this manner without having setuid-root shell scripts. This is because the deployment process in TIBCO Administrator relies on being able to programmatically restart the web server. Needless to say, we're not precisely keen on this.

As a side item, if you want to install SunONE for use with the portal, you actually have to install TRA, Administrator, SunONE and the Portal as the same non-root user. The documentation suggests that having these products share the same group is sufficient, but that isn't true.

Eventually we have got to the stage of having a reverse proxy in front of our web server. This works great with Tomcat, but not so well with SunONE.

The basic problem with the Portal and the reverse proxy is that the portal generates some absolute links in it's HTML markup. These links must have the host:port of the reverse proxy and not that of the portal web server if they are going to work properly.

Under Tomcat, this is simple - set the proxyHost and proxyPort properties of the <Connector> in the server.xml and voila! it works. Unfortunately SunONE provides no such mechanisim that we can determine. From what I can see, there is no way to configure SunONE to operate transparently behind a proxy!