How to install Jira 6.0.6 on a QNAP TS-569 Pro

The QNAP TS-569 Pro is a Intel Atom based NAS system. Therefore it should be no problem to run any Java based application on it.
I managed to get JDK 7 up and running as well, so Jira should be possible too. I installed version 6.0.6, 32 bit edition, but newer versions should run as well.
Keep in mind that the QNAP TS-569 Pro is running a 32 Bit Linux, despite the fact that the underlying architecture is 64 bit.
I upgraded my RAM to 4GB because running Java server applications like Jira or Confluence need more than the stock 1GB.

Assumptions:

1. All commands are executed using a ssh connection (admin user) to the TS-569 Pro
2. I did not use a bash environment. Only the built in sh shell was used.
3. In general you don't need a separate installation of Java 6 or 7, because Jira comes with a bundled JRE 7. My NAS already had a JDK 7 installation with JAVA_HOME pointing to that location. But in principle this should not be necessary.
4. To configure the MySQL service I used the phpmyadmin QPKG installation
5. To make things a little bit easier for me and to have more Linux feeling I installed Optware IPKG 

Brief installation instructions:

1. Create an installation directory for Jira. I chose /share/MD0_Data/Opt/jira but this is totally free and up to you.
2. Download the 32 Bit installer version of Jira. and save it to a folder on your NAS. It is a script which contains the complete Jira distribution. You don't have to extract anything manual. 
3. Change into the directory where the downloaded file resides
4. If not already done make the script executable: chmod +x atlassian-jira-6.0.6-x32.bin
5. Start the script by executing: ./atlassian-jira-6.0.6-x32.bin
6. You will get an error saying:
   Sorry, but I could not find gunzip in path. Aborting
7. I found the solution for that problem in this forum post:
   The gunzip Version on the QNAP seems to be a different one than the script is expecting. The option -V is not recognized by the QNAP gunzip version.
   So just load the script into an editor of your choice (I used the ipkg emacs version) and remove these lines from the script and save it afterwards:

 gunzip -V > /dev/null 2>&1  
 if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]; then  
  echo "Sorry, but I could not find gunzip in path. Aborting."  
  exit 1  
 fi  

8. Start the script again and wait a couple of minutes (yes indeed, it took 2-3 minutes on my NAS)
9. The console installer starts after the script extracted the installation files and you can continue your Jira installation just like described in the official Jira installation documentation.
10. You may tweak the JVM settings in the setenv.sh file of your Jira installation to adjust memory settings.
11. That's it. The next thing would be to create start/stop scripts for the runlevels to make the Jira service start whenever the NAS is starting. This is stuff for one of the next articles.

Making Screenshots with Greenshot under Windows

I don't think I have high requirements for a good screenshot tool but Greenshot is by far the best one I have ever used.
It even has plugins for Jira and Confluence. Moreover it is free to use even in commercial environment. Cool :-)

Running Confluence and Jira in the same JBoss AppServer

I recently wanted to get rid off several Standalone distributions of web applications hosted on my server at home. Each web application is using its own Tomcat Servlet container and is consuming memory and cpu due to the fact that each container is running in its own JVM.
Jira was already running on my JBoss 4.0.4GA instance and I wanted to deploy Confluence 2.5.1 in the same instance. It turns out to be not that easy, because there are a few problems with the classloading mechanism JBoss is using.
But after a few minutes I found the solution on Confluence great documentation site. The comments from Lindsay Smith and Gerald MacKenzie in this article gave me the hints about what to do to run both software products in a single JBoss instance.
Here we go (For a complete list of tasks for upgrading or installing Confluence take a look at Atlassians Homepage. The following steps describe only the procedure to build a Confluence WAR archive that is deployable in a JBoss container next to an existing JIRA WAR archive!):

1. Unpack the new confluence WAR version in a directory called $NEW_CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_DIR
2. Delete file: $NEW_CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_DIR/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties
3. Delete file: $NEW_CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_DIR/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/commons-logging.jar
4. Delete file: $NEW_CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_DIR/confluence/WEB-INF/lib/log4j.jar
5. Create the file $NEW_CONFLUENCE_INSTALL_DIR/confluence/WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml with the following content
   

    <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?><!DOCTYPE jboss-web PUBLIC-//JBoss//DTD Web Application 2.4//EN" "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss-web_4_0.dtd">  
    <jboss-web>  
    <class-loading java2ClassLoadingCompliance="false">  
         <loader-repository>  
              com.example:loader=unique-archive-name         
              <loader-repository-config>  
                   java2ParentDelegation=false  
              </loader-repository-config>       
         </loader-repository>  
    </class-loading>  
    <context-root>/confluence</context-root>  
    </jboss-web>  
   

6. Build the Confluence WAR archive using the build script.