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20030430 Wednesday April 30, 2003

Why this site had problems yesterday I got the following e-mail from Keith this morning on why this site had so many stability problems yesterday. 

I've not got some more detail on what happened yesterday...

One of my clients took it upon themselves to install a game server on our 
machine, renamed the executable to "java" to hide it, and started hosting 
head to head games on our machine.  They ran up about 7 GB in traffic and 
sucked the life out of the server.  

By our doing a 'kill -s 9 java' and then restart then JVMs, it did kill 
their server until they started it again.

I finally tracked it down by seeing all the bandwidth on a non-standard port 
and finding an executable named 'java' running it, but it wasn't the JRE 
java that one would expect.

Anyway, just in case this happens again I've got some more RAM going in to 
the box tonight starting with the server that is currently the hot backup.  
You may see 15 minutes or so of downtime tonight when we move over to that 
server and bring the current one down for it's memory upgrade.

Keith

Phew! It's good to know it's not Roller that's causing the problem, but some bastard hogging all the memory. Was that you Simon? just kidding Posted in Java at Apr 30 2003, 10:35:00 AM MDT 1 Comment

NT Authentication using jCIFS Filter I became aware of the jCIFS (Java Common Internet File System) project today (via the tomcat-user mailing list).

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) is the de-facto standard file sharing protocol on the Microsoft Windows platform. It is the underlying networking protocol used when accessing "shares" with Windows Explorer, the Network Neighborhood, via a Map Network Drive... dialog, the C:\> net use * \\server\share commands, or smbclient on UNIX, smbfs on Linux, and elsewhere.

What's cool about this project is you can use a filter it provides to do NT Domain Authentication. Unlike the JAAS module I've covered before, this one doesn't require Windows and it also supports auto-login for Internet Explorer. This sounds like a great project if you have an NT Domain you need to talk to for authentication. Posted in Java at Apr 30 2003, 09:58:52 AM MDT Add a Comment