Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Feb 8, 2012, 9:30 am
If there is a better way to celebrate Valentine's Day than sitting at your desk watching a live, streaming webinar about F5 BigIP iRule development tips and tricks, I challenge you to place them in the comments below! The event runs for 90 minutes starting at 10AM Pacific/1PM Eastern on ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Feb 1, 2012, 5:55 pm
The Apache HTTP Server project released version 2.2.22 and it's an important release, addressing 6 "significant" security vulnerabilities: CVE-2011-3368 (cve.mitre.org)  -  Reject requests where the request-URI does not match the HTTP specification, preventing unexpected expansion of ta...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 23, 2012, 11:18 am
The Apache Tomcat team announced the release of Tomcat 7.0.25. There are quite a few new features and bug fixes in this release, including alignment of the Servlet 3.0 specification with the revision A maintenance release, updates to the Eclipse JDT compiler, Commons Pool, and Commons Daemon, and mo...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 19, 2012, 9:30 am
Here's an interesting workaround to a problem I had been having that has been causing me ssl connection headaches in Firefox for years. Here is a description of the problem: I try to connect to an SSL encrypted page in Firefox and that page generates a certificate warning. What should no...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 16, 2012, 12:28 pm
The Apache Tomcat team released Tomcat 5.5.35 today. The changelog lists 18 fixes and improvements including fixes for folks running Tomcat on Windows. You can download a copy from a mirror near you.
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 13, 2012, 12:22 pm
Red Hat Consulting has released a migration guide for folks interested in moving off of WebLogic and onto JBoss. Nice to see the app server wars are heating up again.  
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 4, 2012, 2:39 pm
It may only be mildly helpul news but it was difficult for me to find anywhere online what was included in the box with the BlackBerry PlayBook.  Both the iPad and Kindle Fire product pages display what's included with the purchase but all I could find regarding the PlayBook box contents was what w...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 3, 2012, 11:00 am
I read a lot. I have owned a first generation Apple iPad for a while now and although I love it, reading while laying down in bed or on the sofa can be tough. After an hour or so, I really start to feel the size and weight of the iPad digging into my chest or stomach. I find myself wishing that it w...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jan 2, 2012, 5:03 pm
Here are the top 10 posts of 2011 for my blog, which were published during 2011. Adding iTerm2 Themes iTerm 2 is a great replacement to the built-in OS X Terminal.app and back in February 2011, iTerm 2 introduced support for themes. Initially, it was pretty tricky to figure out...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Dec 6, 2011, 9:03 am
The Apache Tomcat team announced the release of Tomcat 6.0.35 earlier today. The changelog lists only 1 fix but 6.0.35 also incorporates the fixes and improvements from the unreleased 6.0.34 version. Many of the fixes and improvements appear to be in the area of memory leak prevention and there is a...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Nov 28, 2011, 9:57 am
Over the long U.S. holiday weekend, the Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.23.  The changelog lists mostly bug fixes but there are some new features in this release that are geared towards increasing startup times for applications.  A summary (taken from the release announcement) of these new...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Nov 16, 2011, 5:54 am
Earlier today, Guillaume Laforge announced that Gaelyk 1.1 was out. Below are highlights of this version, (which was copied from the release announcement): Upgraded to Groovy 1.8.4 and App Engine SDK 1.6.0 The new get() methods on the datastore service now also w...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Nov 3, 2011, 7:59 pm
Poor DigiCert.  I am really starting to feel sorry for them.  First, there was a lot of search engine confusion over whether there was a link between DigiNotar's recent breach and DigiCert. (There isn't)  Now, there is news that a Malaysian firm named Digicert Sdn Bhd has had to revoke some of it...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Oct 25, 2011, 9:59 am
Those scamps at VeriSign must be the life of parties!  What could be more hilarious than selling a three year certificate chained to an intermediate certificate that expires in only one year?  How about providing four days notice of the impending expiration of that intermediate certificate? &...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Oct 20, 2011, 10:18 pm
I nearly fell out of my chair when I came across this post at the Internet Storm Center:  JBoss Worm.  JBoss certainly has come a long way--now it's got a worm!  The JBoss Community article "Statement Regarding Security Threat to JBoss Application Server" has some additional information but both ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Oct 4, 2011, 3:07 pm
www.apple.com unavailable after iPhone event keynote ended.
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 22, 2011, 4:19 pm
The Apache Tomcat team quietly released version 5.5.34 today.  At the time of this writing, there is no release announcement on the site yet other than a short blurb stating that it is out and that security and bug fixes are included.   The changelog (not yet updated at the time this...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 14, 2011, 9:30 am
The Apache httpd server team released version 2.2.21!  This release fixes a couple security vulnerabilities as well as some other bugs.  The vulnerabilities addressed in this release are: SECURITY: CVE-2011-3348 (cve.mitre.org) mod_proxy_ajp when combined with mod_proxy_balancer: Preve...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 7, 2011, 7:06 am
See this article on ABC News for more details as Belgium-based Certificate Authority GlobalSign has temporarily ceased ssl certificate issuance in the wake of the announcement yesterday from comodohacker that he(?) has managed to breach 4 other major CAs. GlobalSign was the only one of the four hig...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 6, 2011, 10:00 am
Systems Administration can be frustrating at times, especially in the area of security compliance and vulnerability management. For all my development readers with friends in operations who are wondering why their sysadmins seem so cranky the first couple of weeks into the new quarter, it is most l...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 5, 2011, 8:00 am
If you are running apache 2.2 (the current version in Ubuntu Server on my recently created VM being 2.2.17) and you wish to mitigate your web server against exploitation by the Apache Range Header Denial of Service vulnerability and the killapache exploit, below is the mitigation steps that worked b...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Sep 2, 2011, 8:39 am
The Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.21 today, which fixes some bugs and addresses some security issues.  Some of the more important changes in this release, which were summarized in the release announcement, include: A fix for CVE-2011-3190 that allowed an attacker to inject requ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 31, 2011, 10:53 pm
Just a short note for folks hitting the search engines wondering if Digicert and DigiNotar are the same firm:  the answer is "No". DigiNotar is the CA that has been in the news lately who suffered a breach resulting in the issuance of fraudulent ssl certificates.  Digicert has not been brea...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 30, 2011, 4:18 pm
The Apache httpd team released version 2.2.20 today, which addresses the recently announced Range Header Denial of Service vulnerability.  You can download a copy from a mirror near you and, hopefully, the distros will have updates available soon.  The changelog also lists a couple other fixes in ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 25, 2011, 10:02 am
There is a nasty exploit in the news lately, a perl-based script called "Apache Killer" that provides an easy way to issue a denial of service attack against an apache server from a single source.  The Register has a complete write-up on the vulnerability and the exploit, SANS has started covering ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 24, 2011, 10:03 am
Free* for Windows and Linux developers, Free-ish for Mac developers Today, VMWare announced the availability of Micro Cloud Foundry, a full Cloud Foundry implementation packaged in a vmware image that developers deploy to their local machines. The full release announcement is over on the...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 18, 2011, 2:18 pm
The Apache Tomcat team released Tomcat 6.0.33 today, which addresses some security issues and fixes some bugs (ok, ok, quite a few bugs).  It's the first tomcat 6 release in about 6 months.  The changelog provides more details on the changes in this release and you can download copies from a mirro...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 12, 2011, 8:47 am
The Apache Tomcat team has released version 7.0.20 today.  This version contains bug fixes and the following new features and fixes (the highlights below were taken from the release announcement): JSP files with dependencies in JARs are no longer recompiled on every access thereby impro...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 11, 2011, 9:06 am
There's a nice new iTerm2 beta out today: iTerm2-1_0_0_20110810.zip Changes in this release (reprinted from the announcement page): Major New Features Add support for loading prefs from a custom folder (e.g., Dropbox) or URL. This makes it easy to share a config between mu...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 10, 2011, 3:09 pm
Today, the Apache Tomcat team announced that tomcat 5.5 will no longer be actively maintained after September 30, 2012.  After this point in time, upgrades are highly unlikely except only in the case of dire security vulnerability.   Three months later on December 31, 2012, almost all ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 8, 2011, 10:47 pm
I'm sure I've blogged before that a systems administrator's day never really ends.  If we're not resolving issues or implementing project deliverables or closing tickets at work, we are at home providing numerous reasons to our 5 year olds why logins to Little Big Planet servers could be failing or...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 5, 2011, 10:49 pm
Guillaume Laforge announced the release of Gaelyk 1.0 a short while ago.  Head on over to the Gaelyk site for more information or grab the binaries from the download page.  The changelog in the release announcement lists the following changes: ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Aug 3, 2011, 11:51 pm
I started playing around with Ubuntu Server on a locally created virtualbox virtual machine today and used aptitude to install tomcat 6.0.28.  Being used to the implementation one downloads directly from the Apache Software Foundation, quite a few minutes were spent figuring out where aptitude plac...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 31, 2011, 1:04 pm
I'm releasing an update to CryptoNark today, which is a maintenance release that fixes a few bugs that have been sitting out there for a little while now.  No new SSL/TLS testing functionality is in this release.  The three changes in this release are: Modified cryptonark to utilize a p...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 24, 2011, 10:48 am
The previous post became outdated when newer versions of iTerm2 updated the Preferences UI, so this post is meant to cover iTerm2 version 1.0 (and newer). The iTerm2 Color Gallery page is the centralized repository for iTerm2 themes and provides links to available themes if you want to ...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 19, 2011, 10:44 am
A few days ago, the apache tomcat team announced that Tomcat 7 through version 7.0.18, Tomcat 6 through version 6.0.32, and Tomcat 5.5 through version 5.5.33 contained some information disclosure and availability-related vulnerabilities.  Today, the Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.19, which...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 12, 2011, 11:46 am
I saw the announcement over on Rich Sharples' blog that JBoss Application Server 7 is out.  The blog post covers some of the interesting new features and changes.  I also received an email from Redhat with 7 reasons to love about the new release: Blazing fast start-up time - up to 10X faster...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 11, 2011, 10:00 am
One of the nice features built into mod_jk is an automatic retry of a request if a worker is down.  It will not necessarily do this by default but it is a configurable option that a lot of people utilize in the event an upstream tomcat, jboss, or glassfish instance is timing out on a socket connect...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jul 8, 2011, 1:45 pm
The Apache Tomcat team released version 1.2.32 of the Tomcat Connectors (mod_jk, isapi_redirect) today.  This release includes bug fixes and new features and documentation updates.  The Tomcat Connectors Changelog provides a listing of all that has changed and you can download it from a mirror nea...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jun 20, 2011, 11:22 am
I first saw it mentioned on twitter this morning and now my requests to them are timing out but it looks as if StartCom Ltd. *may* have suffered a security breach.  The following message was on their site when I connected a short while ago: Maintenance Due to a secur...
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Chris M. posted an article on allsorts and notions - Jun 17, 2011, 11:58 am
The Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.16 today.  According to the release announcement, new features include: NIO implementation of the AJP connector Enable Servlet 3 asynchronous processing support when using clustering Add parallel deployment support to the Manage...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - Jun 17, 2011, 11:58 am
The Apache Tomcat team released version 7.0.16 today.  According to the release announcement, new features include:   NIO implementation of the AJP connector Enable Servlet 3 asynchronous processing support when using clustering Add parallel deployment support to the Manager...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - May 26, 2011, 9:09 am
Exciting news for Apache Roller fans:  Version 5.0 has been released.  Here's a short summary of new features: Media blogging features OpenID for user logins OAuth for AtomPub authentication Simple multi-domain support Code base improvements &...
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Chris M. posted an article on allsorts and notions - May 26, 2011, 9:09 am
Exciting news for Apache Roller fans:  Version 5.0 has been released.  Here's a short summary of new features: Media blogging features OpenID for user logins OAuth for AtomPub authentication Simple multi-domain support Code base improvements The "What's ne...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - May 23, 2011, 9:20 am
The Apache HTTP Server project team has released version 2.2.19 (release announcement), which corrects regressions introduced in the recently released 2.2.18 version.  This regression wound up breaking a lot of third-party modules.  If you recently upgraded to 2.2.18 and began experiencing problem...
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Chris M. posted an article on allsorts and notions - May 23, 2011, 9:20 am
The Apache HTTP Server project team has released version 2.2.19 (release announcement), which corrects regressions introduced in the recently released 2.2.18 version.  This regression wound up breaking a lot of third-party modules.  If you recently upgraded to 2.2.18 and began experiencing problem...
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - May 15, 2011, 10:35 pm
A new stable version of Perl has been released, version 5.14.  The big new feature in this release is full Unicode support but there's also improved IPv6 support and CPAN client configuration has been improved.  The release announcement over on perlbuzz has more complete information on this new re...
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Chris M. posted an article on allsorts and notions - May 15, 2011, 10:35 pm
A new stable version of Perl has been released, version 5.14.  The big new feature in this release is full Unicode support but there's also improved IPv6 support and CPAN client configuration has been improved.  The release announcement over on perlbuzz has more complete information on this new re...
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Chris M. posted an article on allsorts and notions - May 15, 2011, 2:59 pm
This is thrilling for me:  CryptoNark was one of the featured tools during the Tool Time portion of this week's HNNCast on Hacker News Network.  Interestingly, the one feature they noted that makes CryptoNark somewhat limited is a feature I'm presently working on.
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Chris M. posted an article on Blogging Techstacks - May 15, 2011, 2:59 pm
This is thrilling for me:  CryptoNark was one of the featured tools during the Tool Time portion of this week's HNNCast on Hacker News Network.  Interestingly, the one feature they noted that makes CryptoNark somewhat limited is a feature I'm presently working on.
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