Tuesday, April 1. 2008

Amazon ec2 tools - choosing the right JVM

I have just gotten around to using the amazon ec2 tools to manage my amazon machine images from my linux laptop. I mentioned before that I am rolling with fedora 8 on a new laptop, and it's been sweet. But there are gotchas here and there and I ran into one today with the ec2 tools.

Turns out that fedora 8 comes with 2 JVMs: GCJ 1.5.0 and IcedTea 1.7.0 - those are installed via yum or selected during the install process. I have no problems with any java-based GUI apps that I have installed like Oxygen and dbvisualizer, but when running the ec2-describe-images command, I got the following error:


Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org.codehaus.xfire.aegis.type.xml.SourceType
at java.lang.Class.initializeClass(libgcj.so.8rh)

etc....


I had my JAVA_HOME set to what redhat and fedora lilke: /usr/lib/jvm/java, which is really a sym link pointing into the /etc/alternatives library of sym links. It's actually a great way to switch globally between JVMs, because you can use the system-switch-java applet to quicky change your JVM if you have multiple versions installed. So I did and switched from 1.7 over to GNU 1.5 and tried again. Same exception was thrown.

It turns out the the ec2 tools really only work with Sun's JVM, which I downloaded and installed via the RPM from sun.com. After installing, uninstalling, reinstalling a few times I determined that for whatever reason the 1.6 JVM from Sun was never going to appear as an option within the system-switch-java applet. So I changed my JAVA_HOME variable from /usr/lib/jvm/java to /usr/java/default, which is what Sun likes.

Now the ec2 command line tools work great!

Posted by thaddeus in Redhat Linux at 15:43 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Thanks for posting this. I had some problems getting the commands working myself and I was able to get it working with the same method. Saved me quite a bit of time troubleshooting.
#1 Brian Fehrle on 2010-05-20 10:57 (Reply)
Thanks for posting this. After I downloaded and installed jre-6u21-linux-i586.bin. I was able to get it working with the same method, too.
#2 Anonymous on 2010-08-12 01:42 (Reply)

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