Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Posts Tagged Systems Administration

Merge multiples MP3 files into one

This last week someone sent me a CD with fifty 60 second tracks (it was a presentation that someone inexplicably saved as fifty separate tracks instead of one contiguous fifty minute block) that they wanted ripped into a single MP3. Ripping is easy with CDex and my initial google search left with with Audacity, [...]


Top 15 Ant Best Practices

Good stuff over at OnJava.com, the article “Top 15 Ant Best Practices” gives 15 recommendations on how you should be using Ant to structure and complete your builds. We’re using most of these already at work; I’d be curious to know the author’s take on the deployment system we’ve developed using Ant. I’ve got [...]


Tomcat 5.0.x and ClientAbortException

I’ve got an application deployed on Tomcat 5.0.28 that, when in production, uses log4j with the SMTP appender to send relevant debug / error messages via email. Soon after deploying the application I began receiving messages from the application which contained this stack trace:

java.io.IOException: ClientAbortException: java.net.SocketException: Connection reset by peer: socket write error [...]


Older MySQL JDBC Driver issues with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE

I haven’t worked on my wife’s recipe site in ages. Originally written as an experiment with JSP and Java, I think my mom and Karen are the only people that use it (which is fine with me). In any case, I recently moved it to a new host and saw a weird issue pop [...]


Modifying Memory Allocation on Tomcat 5.x on Windows

A search for ‘tomcat 5 outofmemory windows‘ returns about 2000 hits, not one of them shows you how can increase the amount of memory allocated to Tomcat via the Apache Tomcat Properties applet when running on Windows (some point to this Tomcat configuration document which seems to be a bit out of date). Start [...]


Configuring Apache James to send email via a smart host

Unfortunately we’re still using Windows on our servers at work, the last application I deployed didn’t have IIS installed on it (yay!), which means no local SMTP service. I needed a local SMTP server so I installed Apache James (I know, it’s probably overkill, but we might use some of it’s other features later). [...]


Tomcat 5.0.x bug with dollar sign (and non ASCII characters)

Hoping to bring this to the top of the queue for anyone else that runs into this: if you put configuration information into your Tomcat conf\server.xml file and said configuration contains a dollar sign ‘$’, according to bugzilla [1,2], the dollar sign is interpreted and thus doesn’t show up unless you double up on it. [...]


Tabbing Through Tabs

My boss asked me today if it was possible to tab through the tabs of a Firefox window (the only drawback to tabbed browsing is that you lose ALT-TAB). Turns out you can use CTRL-PAGEDOWN and CTRL-PAGEUP to tab through multiple tabs in a Firefox window, Which is nice. Some of the other ones I [...]


ProFTPD and jailing users

I moved all my sites to vpscenter.com a couple months back on Joe’s recommendation and I’m hosting sites for a couple buddies on it right now. One of the problems with opening your server up to your buddies is that, trustworthy as they may be, you don’t want them mucking around with the system by [...]


Automated Application Deployment with Tomcat: Part II with Subversion And Ant

Got around to writing the deployment scripts that go with the Subversion work I did last week. As part of the scripts, I also worked on the problem I wrote about a couple weeks ago (ie: needing different log4j properties files per environment). Once you have a source control solution and a master build [...]


← Before After →