There wasn’t a any clear-cut guide for installing Alfresco 2.2 ECM on Windows Server 2003, so I took some notes. Here goes…

  1. Installed jdk-1_5_0_15-windows-i586-p.exe with default options. The JDK is required (I tried it with just the JRE first).
  2. Installed mysql-essential-5.0.67-win32.msi with the following options:
    • Complete
    • Configure Now
    • Standard Configuration
    • Install As Windows Service, Launch Automatically
    • Root Password: ********
  3. Installed mysql-gui-tools-5.0-r12-win32.msi with default options.
  4. Installed OpenOffice_2.4.1_Win32Intel_install_wJRE_en-US.exe with the following options:
    • Custom
    • Disable Java Runtime Environment
  5. Unpacked alfresco-enterprise-tomcat-2.2.0.zip to C:\Alfresco.
  6. Followed these steps to use MySQL database.
  7. Also uncommented lines in custom-repository.properties for db.username, db.password, db.pool.initial, db.pool.max.
  8. Added JAVA_HOME system variable pointing to C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_15.

I ran alf_start.bat, waited for the “Started in…” message, and tried http://localhost:8080/alfresco. I got a Tomcat 404 error, and my alfresco.log showed the following (abbreviated) errors:

  • Error creating bean with name ‘dictionaryRepositoryBootstrap’…
  • Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
  • ERROR [org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader] Context initialization failed

It turns out Alfresco removed the MySQL JDBC driver in 2.2 for licensing purposes, so I just needed to place mysql-connector-java-5.1.6-bin.jar in C:\Alfresco\tomcat\common\lib. Started up fine after that :).

After all of this, I noticed Alfresco would shutdown out of nowhere, I’d get some hs_err_pid logs in C:\Alfresco. The java.exe process was also taking 99% of the CPU and I couldn’t end the process. The machine was basically useless until I restarted. After a bit of back-and-forth with Alfresco support and some digging around, I finally figured out that NetBIOS being disabled was the entire problem. You can enable it in Local Area Connection Properties > TCP/IP > Advanced > WINS.

So, no more freezes, but then I couldn’t access the CIFS. One thing after another, right? I would get a username/password prompt if I tried to access it by \\<ip>\Alfresco, but it didn’t like any of the credentials I entered, and didn’t recognize \\<machinename>A\Alfresco at all. Finally, I found that having “Local Area Connection > Client for Microsoft Networks” disabled was the cause of that.

Both of those settings are not default in a Windows install, but they were set that way in the VM image that was used for my server. Talk about frustrating…

There also seems to be a memory leak in Alfresco that will cause the OutOfMemory Java heap space error in the virtual Tomcat instance. Disabling link validation fixed this for me. You can do that by setting the “pollInterval” to 0 in “C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\linkvalidation-service-context.xml”.