Watne Household Site

Back in March, I took advantage of a sale at Costco, advanced the inevitable update, and bought a blue-colored iMac. With its Apple M1 chip, after reinstalling essential packages using Homebrew, I had to make multiple changes to the Apache and Tomcat server configurations to allow my website, and the Tomcat server serving the biking weather suitability forecast application, to work properly again. Since these explorations – including a dead end trying to switch from using Apache to Nginx for the web server, given what seems to be the trend and the latter’s apparent strength being reverse proxy work – were done very sporadically, it took me until this month finally to get it right.

One thing I am glad I did relatively early in the process was to make the new configuration folders git repositories, so I could review the history of document changes and, more importantly, reverse them if needed. This was done using the following steps for the Apache (httpd) folder:

cd /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd/
git init
git checkout -b starting_m1_config
git add --all
git commit -m 'Initial commit of starting M1 config'

The first part of the update was dealing with the change of all /user/local/etc/httpd paths to /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd. After copying my backed-up configuration files from /usr/local/etc/httpd to /opt/homebrew/etc/httpd, I did a global search and replace for this path change throughout the files in the updated folder.

I uncommented a few modules and updated the php_module path reference in httpd.conf:

LoadModule xml2enc_module /opt/homebrew/Cellar/httpd/2.4.53/lib/httpd/modules/mod_xml2enc.so
LoadModule proxy_html_module /opt/homebrew/Cellar/httpd/2.4.53/lib/httpd/modules/mod_proxy_html.so
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LoadModule proxy_connect_module /opt/homebrew/Cellar/httpd/2.4.53/lib/httpd/modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
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LoadModule php_module /opt/homebrew/Cellar/php/8.1.6/lib/httpd/modules/libphp.so

Finally, I moved the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse parameters from httpd.conf to the two <VirtualHost *:443> elements – the only difference between the two being one with a ServerName of localhost, the other johnwatne.no-ip.biz – within the extra/httpd-vhosts.conf configuration file. I also added additional proxy-related parameters based on suggestions in various items found in searching for answers. Whether or not they were needed, I don’t know, but they are part of my final, working solution:

   ProxyPreserveHost Off
   ProxyRequests Off
   ProxyVia Off
   <Proxy *>
      Require all granted
   </Proxy>
   ProxyPass "/bikingweather" "http://localhost:[tomcat-port]/bikingweather"
   ProxyPassReverse "/bikingweather" "http://localhost:[tomcat-port]/bikingweather"

In the code above, [tomcat-port] is the port on which the Tomcat server is listening, which is 8080 by default. The final thing I needed to do with the Apache configuration was to make sure I was consistent in having both paths listed for the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse parameters not end with a “/” character. Having only one of them end with the additional character was breaking the proxy URL reference, and I kept getting whitelabel error pages from Tomcat.

One item I needed to fix for the update to Apple Silicon on the web application side was to update one of the dependencies used by the biking suitability forecast application, a Spring Boot application. Looking through the logs for the application when loading the application, I saw the following [edited to remove more info than is likely helpful]:

2022-05-29 23:04:44,238 ERROR nsServerAddressStreamProviders[line  73] Unable to load io.netty.resolver.dns.macos.MacOSDnsServerAddressStreamProvider, fallback to system defaults. This may result in incorrect DNS resolutions on MacOS.
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException: null
	at jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:79) ~[?:?]
	at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller(Constructor.java:499) ~[?:?]
	at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:483) ~[?:?]
	at io.netty.resolver.dns.DnsServerAddressStreamProviders.<clinit>(DnsServerAddressStreamProviders.java:64) ~[netty-resolver-dns-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
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Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: failed to load the required native library
	at io.netty.resolver.dns.macos.MacOSDnsServerAddressStreamProvider.ensureAvailability(MacOSDnsServerAddressStreamProvider.java:110) ~[netty-resolver-dns-classes-macos-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
	at io.netty.resolver.dns.macos.MacOSDnsServerAddressStreamProvider.<init>(MacOSDnsServerAddressStreamProvider.java:120) ~[netty-resolver-dns-classes-macos-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
	at jdk.internal.reflect.DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.newInstance(DirectConstructorHandleAccessor.java:67) ~[?:?]
	... 94 more
Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: could not load a native library: netty_resolver_dns_native_macos_aarch_64
	at io.netty.util.internal.NativeLibraryLoader.load(NativeLibraryLoader.java:224) ~[netty-common-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
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	... 91 more
	Suppressed: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: could not load a native library: netty_resolver_dns_native_macos
		at io.netty.util.internal.NativeLibraryLoader.load(NativeLibraryLoader.java:224) ~[netty-common-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
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	Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: META-INF/native/libnetty_resolver_dns_native_macos.jnilib
		at io.netty.util.internal.NativeLibraryLoader.load(NativeLibraryLoader.java:166) ~[netty-common-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
		... 99 more
		Suppressed: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no netty_resolver_dns_native_macos in java.library.path: /Users/John/Library/Java/Extensions:/Library/Java/Extensions:/Network/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Java/Extensions:/usr/lib/java:.
			at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:2434) ~[?:?]
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Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: META-INF/native/libnetty_resolver_dns_native_macos_aarch_64.jnilib
	at io.netty.util.internal.NativeLibraryLoader.load(NativeLibraryLoader.java:166) ~[netty-common-4.1.76.Final.jar:4.1.76.Final]
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A little bit of digging revealed that these were related to using the Intel version of the netty-resolver-dns-native-macos Maven artifact. To use the correct version, I needed to add it to the dependencies, along with the dependency-specific “classifier” value to ensure I was using the Apple Silicon – aarch_64 – version of the resolver. This was done by adding the following to the list of dependencies in the application’s pom.xml file.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.netty</groupId>
            <artifactId>netty-resolver-dns-native-macos</artifactId>
            <classifier>osx-aarch_64</classifier>
        </dependency>

I also updated the netty.version value in the properties section of pom.xml to the current version.

After all these fixes, the main WordPress site’s and the web application’s links to each other – including shared font files – are once again working correctly.