Tief und Langsam, Baby!

After being burned by ScheduleWorld’s policy of first luring you in for free and then beginning to try and charge money, I decided to install Funambol myself and be done with all those synchronization headaches. Turns out installing funambol isn’t quite that easy, so for everybody interested as well, here’s a little step-by-step guide. You will need some command line literacy though.

1. Download funambol-7.1.1.bin (if, like in my case, you have a headless server, also download funambol-admin-7.1.0.tgz for your desktop/laptop)
2. Install the bundle. I went for /usr/lib/funambol as an installation directory, the default is /opt/Funambol. It shouldn’t matter much. Installation is started by issuing sh funambol-7.1.1.bin while ssh‘d into the server. From now on, I’ll assume the Funambol bundle to be installed in /usr/lib/funambol (and not /usr/lib/funambol/Funambol!)
3. If you don’t have it installed already, sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre. This step isn’t theoretically necessary if you’re on a 32bit OS. Next, edit /usr/lib/funambol/bin/funambol to contain export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun" and export JRE_HOME=$JAVA_HOME at the top. Also change COMED=true to COMED=false somewhere around line 50 while you’re at it (this prevents the start/stop script from trying to start or stop the Hypersonic database, since we’re going to use MySQL). To save some space on the server, you can safely rm -rf /usr/lib/funambol/tools/jre-1.5.0. In order to keep track of things, I went into /usr/lib/funambol/tools and did ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun. Update: You might want to do ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun jre-1.6.0 instead – thanks for the hint, Rachael!
   Also see the outdated HOWTOInstallOn64bit article on the Funambol Wiki.
4. Go to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext and download mysql-connector-java-5.1.7.tar.gz. The tar.gz should contain a file called mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar which you have to put into the ext directory. All other contents of the tar.gz and the tar.gz itself can be deleted again. Now back into /usr/lib/funambol and there to edit ds-server/install.properties. Line 24 will have to be changed from dbms=hypersonic to dbms=mysql. Next, comment lines 63 through 67, uncomment lines 55 through 59 and make them fit to your needs. For me, they read as follows:

   
jdbc.classpath=../tools/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext/mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar
jdbc.driver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/SOME_DATABASE_NAME
jdbc.user=SOME_USER
jdbc.password=SOME_PASSWORD

   Save and close. If you haven’t already done so, create a mysql database with the same name, username and password as you specified in install.properties. That database will now be populated by calling the Funambol install script through bin/install. Just answer yes (“y”) everywhere, unless you don’t want the web demo, in which case you answer no to that question, of course. rm -rf tools/hypersonic to save yet a bit more disk space. (Again, there’s a slightly outdated page for this in the Funambol wiki – https://core.forge.funambol.org/wiki/BundleMyPSSQL)

5. Funambol itself should now run, which you can check by calling bin/funambol start. Check with ps ax | grep funambol and a visit to http://YOUR_SERVER:8080. If it doesn’t work for some reason and you need help, I can recommend #funambol on freenode.net with a tip o’ the hat to Reed there. The easiest way to make Funambol start automagically would be to ln -s /usr/lib/funambol/bin/funambol /etc/rc2.d/S99funambol.
6. In keeping the headline’s promise, as a last step LigHTTPd has to be configured now. I decided I wanted Funambol running in a subdomain, so I put this piece of configuration into /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/funambol.conf:

   
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(funambol\.).*$" {
proxy.balance = "fair"
proxy.server = ( "/" => (
("host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 8080, "fix-redirects" => 1)
))
}

   After symlinking it into conf-enabled and restarting lighttpd, you should be rid of the :8080 in the URL. Now would be a good time to install the Funambol Admin in your desktop and read funambol-installation-and-configuration-guide-v7.1.pdf to find out how to change the default admin password.

Happy configuring and drop me a comment or an email (anything @ this domain) if you feel like it

Updates:

• Disable automatic user creation: Open the Funambol Administration Tool, login to your server, go to Server settings and change the Officer entry to com/funambol/server/security/DBOfficer.xml
• A note on MEM_OPTS: when running Funambol in a vserver (as I do), you may very well run into memory problems. The way it works for me now is to set MEM_OPTS="-Xmx32M" in ctp-server, inbox-listener and pim-listener, but set it to 192M in funambol-server.
• HTTP status code 417 when using SyncEvolution: That seems to be a known bug with SyncEvolution, but the corresponding SourceForge bug tracker entry is disabled for some reason. I’ve opened a thread on the Funambol forum to maybe get some help with this. In the meantime, port 8080 will do.

Wollte man -zu welchem Zwecke auch immer- eine unendlich große Menge Licht ansammeln, so bräuchte man sich nur um eine unendlich große Menge Raum, sowie eine unendlich große Menge Zeit kümmern. Da aber nun Raum als auch Zeit (zumindest in diesem Universum) eindeutig endlich sind, folgt daraus, dass Licht immer gegen Schatten, Leben gegen Tod, Gut gegen Böse wird anzutreten haben. Dies ist eine Wahrheit unserer Existenz, mit der wir uns entweder abfinden, oder an der wir zugrunde gehen können.

Kam so über mich…