Geoserver Rabbit Holes

Jul 30, 2024 | geoserver, GIS

TL/DR – Funding is Hard.

Last week I ran down a rabbit hole. While I’m passable as a sysadmin – my skills are lacking in some areas. I had a conversation with someone on hardware and software and we ended on “How would you run this 911 stack of software if you had the choice?”. So let’s test some things.

My first virtual machine made an appearance back in 2012. Virtual Machines are easy to create now. I built one using the latest Ubuntu Server image (2024.04) and loaded Postgresql and Geoserver. It makes me pretty happy just building a VM. It’s silly – but I remember way back at the start of my career that this type of thing was insanity. You can create one on a laptop. The great thing that happened this time – it failed. The VM didn’t – but the software didn’t work. Specifically Geoserver.

Ubuntu 24.04 comes with Tomcat 10. I didn’t think much about it. As I started to troubleshoot the problem and hassling people I figured out that Tomcat 10 was the problem. I run Geoserver using Tomcat. If you read the Docs on Geoserver, you’ll see that it’s been tested on Tomcat 9. There are a few other notes dealing with Java. Jody Garnett sent me a link to the Roadmap for Geoserver Development.

All of this to say the roadmap has asked for funding a lot of improvements one of which is “Making Geoserver work with Tomcat 10”. There are also updates to the Java version it runs on. I accidentally funded Geoserver with $500 dollars in 2023. We held a meeting in Nashville December of 2022 and ended up with about 600 dollars in profit. Since Geoserver/Geosolutions had blown the doors off the meeting we tossed 500 dollars to Geoserver. I/The Nashville Meeting was one of two sponsors that year. Two. Me. 50% of the sponsors for Geoserver.

Where does that leave my VM? I can drop down to a earlier version of Ubuntu – 22.04. Maybe Debian. The problem being this gets more complicated (for me) as time moves on. I solved my immediate problem with docker. It’s running. I tested what I needed to and now onward. Hats off to the Geoserver crew for that Docker image.

For 2024 there are two businesses and 6 people sponsoring geoserver (not me and I’m working on it). There are a lot of people/companies using Geoserver. I’m just starting my support “journey” (I hate that phrase) with Geoserver. QGIS I know well enough I can generally give you an answer in 15 minutes. Geoserver runs a wide range of questions like “Hey I can’t get this to work” to “Hey I’m serving out 10,000 layers and I need to upgrade”. Complicated things I’m not comfortable with but the simple stuff I am.

So what do you do? If you’re using Geoserver consider supporting the effort. You can donate through the OSGEO organization and help out some software. Every little bit helps keep your favorite software moving along and taking the pressure off the funding. It’s free software but it doesn’t happen for free.

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