[tor-bugs] #13089 [Onionoo]: use an embedded web server/servlet engine for Onionoo

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#13089: use an embedded web server/servlet engine for Onionoo
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     Reporter:  iwakeh       |      Owner:
         Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  new
     Priority:  major        |  Milestone:
    Component:  Onionoo      |    Version:
   Resolution:               |   Keywords:
Actual Points:               |  Parent ID:
       Points:               |
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Changes (by karsten):

 * priority:  minor => major


Comment:

 Let's ignore performance measurements for now and assume that embedded
 Tomcat will be fast enough.

 The reason I'm pushing this is that I just broke the Onionoo service for
 over an hour.  I *think* the problem was that the Tomcat on the production
 system still uses Java 6 and didn't like my Java 7 .war.  And it didn't
 like it to the extent that it didn't even let me deploy an older .war
 compiled for Java 6.  I had to ask sysadmins to delete the extracted .war
 and restart Tomcat.  I'm now feeling uncomfortable deploying new Onionoo
 versions on the server.  Let's try to get rid of Tomcat really soon if we
 can, so that we have more control over the service, even without being
 root.  (The alternative is to uninstall Java 7 and switch back to Java 6
 on the production system, but that seems backward.)

 Speaking of, I just discussed the embedded Tomcat idea with our sysadmin,
 and they'd like us to run the two `java` processes as two different users
 for added security; the hourly cronjob would have permissions to write
 files to `/srv/onionoo.torproject.org/onionoo/`, and the serving process
 would only have read permissions to those files.

 I'm going to start the switch to embedded Tomcat tomorrow, unless you
 already have a patch or partial patch.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13089#comment:7>
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