The tech world ceases to exist without innovation. The rate at which technologies evolve and eventually become obsolete will sink your tech-reliant business if you’re not constantly reevaluating and retooling. To keep up, unless you are satisfied with lagging mediocrity, you have to create an environment that is conducive to innovation.
I am frequently amazed at the low priority that some businesses and IT teams seem to place on defining and managing enterprise-wide architectural and configuration standards. It seems to be common sense, but it is not uncommon for me to come across a cluster of application or web servers that are serving the same code, but are using different directory paths, naming conventions, environment variables, etc. and I’ve even found a few that are running different versions of the same software on different servers within the same cluster.
Read more… The Importance of Defining and Implementing Enterprise Standards
Recently, we were faced with a situation where a Weblogic admin server was failing to start, but was leaving very little info in the logs to point to the reason why, so we had to dig a bit deeper to find the cause.
This is the error message as it appeared in the weblogic log:
Read more… Troubleshooting Weblogic Authentication with the Truss Command
A problem you may have come across is your Weblogic or Websphere server complaining that the Entrust SSL certificate is missing the field Basic Constraints. It may have shown up as Java exceptions, or errors with messages about certificate chains received from a website missing the basic constraints extension. Here are some examples:
[Security:090548]The certificate chain received from www.example.com - 10.100.10.100 contained a V3 CA certificate which was missing the basic constraints extension
Read more… Weblogic and Websphere Missing “Basic Constraints” with Entrust SSL Certificates
Using wget and the Tomcat manager, you can script remote tomcat deploys, undeploys, starts, stops, and status.
First, make sure the Tomcat manager is installed and running:
Read more… Command-line Tomcat server control with wget and the Tomcat manager
First, I made a few modifications to the nodemanager start/stop scripts:
(on weblogic 8.1)
in startNodeManager.sh, I added a -D tag to be able to easily spot the nodemanager process when doing a ‘ps’ by adding this line:
Read more… Controlling weblogic node manager with solaris smf as non-root
To trace a java thread from a thread dump to the corresponding thread on Solaris 10, you can find the LWP using pstack by converting the NID (which corresponds to the LWP ID on Solaris) and matching it up in the pstack output, or by finding the TID listed in the pstack output.
Read more… Matching java thread nid & tid to solaris 10 threads using ‘pstack’
I got a wild hair and have been trying to determine the best way to go about parsing java thread dumps with python. After a few failed attempts, I came across the pyparsing python module. Pyparsing is a fairly simple to use (considering what it is doing) parsing module, that makes quick work out of cryptic log files…
I was trying to parse a typical java thread dump, like this one, “web81.prod.dump”:
Read more… Parsing log files with python and the pyparsing module
I was recently setting up a site hosted by bluehost and running drupal.
Before you transfer DNS authority to bluehost, they give you a temporary URL to allow you to get the site up and running and tested before you make it live. The URL is in this format
Read more… Temporary Drupal site redirect problem on Bluehost
Cronolog provides a solution to the age-old problem of tomcat’s catalina.out log file not rotating and growing so large that the server must be stopped to deal with it.
First, install cronolog, which can be downloaded from here.
Read more… Rotating catalina.out in tomcat 5.5 using cronolog
