Here are a few Alfresco tips. Nothing Earth-shattering here–these issues are documented on the wiki or in the forums. I came across these issues while getting the 1.3.0 Alfresco WAR running on Tomcat 5.5.17 with MySQL 4.12 on Ubuntu 5.10 (“Breezy Badger”).

Use extension configuration files to override default repository settings. Refer to this wiki page to learn how to do this. If you are running the WAR file only, you can get some sample configuration files from either the source distribution or the Alfresco-Tomcat bundle. In the bundle, they are in /tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension.

If you move your data directory, drop and re-create your alfresco database. There’s probably a way to avoid this if you need to relocate a production data directory, but if you are just working with test data, dropping and re-creating may be the quickest solution. The data directory stores Lucene full-text indexes as well as user account information. You can specify a location for your data directory using the dir.root property in an extension file.

Add “userServerPrepStmts=false” to your JDBC connection string. If you are using MySQL and you get a Hibernate exception like “Could not execute JDBC batch update…Incorrect arguments to mysql_stmt_execute” try making this change. You can tweak the default JDBC connection string by overriding the db.url configuration property.