Unruly Rambling - jboss tag

Shotty uptime for the past week

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 13:17:17 GMT

For the past week, I've noticed that my site was going down every couple hours and I'd have to restart JBoss in order to get it to come back. Being in busy mode all week, I didn't have time to figure out why. Yesterday, I spent 10 minutes digging around in my logs to find out that some asshat(borrowed from Hani) was hitting my server every couple milliseconds requesting my blog as an attempt to infect me with tons of referral spam. My poor server was crashing with out of memory errors at a record pace and it was getting worse and worse by the minute. His calls were coming in from 2 distinct IP Addresses (217.23.176.2 , 217.23.177.249), both of which originate in Russia. To get around this, I configured iptables to DROP packets from these addresses. All is fine since. The thing that concerns me is that this is quite the reactive approach and could start again at any moment. Thanks to the free service provided by SiteUptime, I get a text message sent to my cell phone when my site goes down. This will help a bit. What I'd like to do is write some sort of script to learn what ip addresses might be doing this, add their ip on the fly and restart iptables. If this becomes a problem, I'll look into this more.

So the moral of the story is that if you are pathetic enough to inject referral spam, I hope you die a long painful death in the dungeons of hell. In the meantime, I will ignore you with the help of iptables.

Nukes on JBoss: Open Source CMS

Fri, 21 May 2004 01:46:22 GMT

Over the past week, I have put together a Nukes on Jboss web application to facilitate communication about an annual golf tournament that my friends and I attend. I guess communication isn't the right word, really it's just a bunch of juvenile trash talking, but fun nevertheless.

My first impressions of nukes is that it is a really great idea that needs more work to be a useable out of the box. Below I have listed some good things and not so goods things that I have discovered so far.

The Good

Easy to get it up and running. Approx 10-15 min.
Wide array of features(forum, cms, permission's based, etc.)
Easy on the pocket book

The Bad

Some of the content is just plain bad. For instance, if you choose the "I am under 18 and do not have parental consent." link while registering, you get the following message: "You must be Nukes on JBoss or over, or have parental permission to register here. Please click here to return to the main page."
There is no way to edit user permission's via the application, you must log into the jmx-console to do so.
Cannot manage forum content(delete posts, edit posts, etc) with the supplied admin account?? Did I do something wrong?

The Ugly

Documentation is very sparse. Other than the JBoss forum and a wiki there is not much more. While its enough to get you off the ground, it isn't good for much more.
The BBCode markup doesn't seem to work. If I use the buttons when submitting a post, the code is posted as text.

WebDAV project to publish/subscribe iCal data

Mon, 26 Apr 2004 13:01:11 GMT

After many moons of thinking, "boy it would be great if my wife and I could subscribe to each others iCal Calendar", I finally got off my butt and figured out what I needed to do. Wasn't quite as complex as I thought it would be. Actually, it was a blank(meaning no jsp's or java code) web app with a settings in the web.xml file. Im using JBoss's auth module org.jboss.security.auth.spi.UsersRolesLoginModule. This works out best since I only have two users.

On thing that wasn't clear to me was how to set it up where we could each publish our work calendar's as Work.ics. I ended up creating a subdirectory for each of us in the root of the webapp stored files there. Not sure if this was the best option or not, but it suits our needs just fine.

Upgraded to Pebble 1.4.1

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 18:02:36 GMT

First, Id like to say thanks Simon for the addition of using a JNDI mail source. Since my mail server requires pop3 authentication, I was unable to use the email updates feature from previous versions. Like a good user, I opened a jira ticket just after the 1.4 release asking for smtp auth support. Simon responded with jndi support, which is even more flexible.

Now the steps to set this up using JBoss 3.2.3.
1) In the deploy dir, edit the mail-service.xml file with your mail server specific info. i.e. hostname, user, pass, etc. Leave the jndi name as it is java:/Mail

2) Edit the default web.xml that comes with pebble 1.4.1. Change <res-ref-name>mail/Session</res-ref-name> to <res-ref-name>Mail</res-ref-name> so it uses JBoss's default mail service. I chose to do this since I have other apps using this same mail service. You could add an additional one to if you wish. Just remember that when you upgrade to the next version of pebble, you changed the shipped web.xml.

3) Add the jboss specific jboss-web.xml descriptor in the WEB-INF dir. It should contain the following resource entry
<resource-ref>
    <res-ref-name>Mail</res-ref-name>
    <res-type>javax.mail.Session</res-type>
    <res-auth>Container</res-auth>
    <jndi-name>java:/Mail</jndi-name>
</resource-ref>

Thats all there is to it

No More Windoze

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 04:04:31 GMT

Well, the time has come to find a new distribution since Redhat will no longer be providing support for 8.0(current version supporting this site). Since Im most familiar with Redhat, Fedora was an obvious choice for my new distro. To ease into this transition and guarantee zero downtime, Ive decided to install Fedora onto the only Windoze box that I currently have. Thats right, my only windoze box will run windoze no more. I guess one could argue that Im upgrading the OS. My plan is to install everything on this machine that my current Redhat 8.0 server provides. My current "can't live without" installed apps are JBoss, MySQL, JAMES, and CVS. Once these are all up and running, Ill do the same to the Redhat 8.0. This will give me poor mans failover in case of a vaporized hard disk or some other hardware failure. I say poor mans failover since redirecting traffic will involve manual reconfiguration of my router.

Fedora Core
Bootup with Disk 1 in CDROM
1) Language Selection
English
2) Keyboard Configuration
U.S. English
3) Mouse Configuration
Generic Wheel Mouse (PS/2)
4) Monitor Configuration
Sony Multiscan 17sf
5) Installation Type
Workstation
6) Disk Partitioning Setup
Manually partition with Disk Druid
7) Disk Setup
/dev/hda1 nfts
/dev/hda2 /boot
/dev/hda3 /
/dev/hda4 swap
8) Boot Loader Configuration
WinXP /dev/hda1 default
Fedora Core /dev/hda3
9) Network Configuration
hostname: pegasus.shoesobjects.com
manual network settings
10) Firewall configuration
No firewall
11) Additional Language Support
none
12) Timezone Selection
America/Chicago
13) Set Root Password
13) Package Installation Defaults
customize software packages to be installed
+ KDE Desktop Environment
+ Server Configuration Tools

Fedora HOWTO apt-get Download the apt-get RPM for Fedora Core here. Once you have installed it, you will need to retrieve an up to date package list using the following command apt-get update. Now that we have the latest package listing for everything installed on the system, we should upgrade the installed packages to the latest and greatest versions. Upon running apt-get upgrade, I see that I have 32 packages to upgrade. By typing a Y at the prompt, I will begin to download all of the upgraded packages, 56.3MB to be specific. Gee, this kinda feels like windows update except I don't have to reboot afterwards :)

Other Packages Installed

More to come.........