Cricalix.Net

I’m doing some final tuning work on the Puppet recipes for our Glassfish installation, and Java has reared one of its ugly heads again. In this case, it’s the whole management of the command line arguments for the JVM.

The majority of the arguments we need to configure take the form
-D$variable=$value
-XX:$variable=$value

The problem is, Java also has arguments that look like
-X$variable$value

This means my nice simple recipe to deal with tweaking the Glassfish JVM options doesn’t actually handle all the cases, so I now need to either go write a more complex one (and imbue it with knowledge as to what variables don’t have equal signs), or write a second recipe with a different name to handle these special snowflake options.

Feh.

Continuing the vacation tale, I present you with Christmas in the Cays…

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Continuing from my previous posting, I present you with the tale of the dragging anchor, part 1.

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Over Christmas, I went back home to Barbados, with my parents, for a two week vacation.  It was an excellent vacation (it felt much longer than two weeks by the end), but it was also a very interesting vacation that included late plane flights, a catamaran, 35 knot winds, turtles and 6 GB of photos.

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On a good day, I learn something new.

Today can thus be classified as a good day, even if it did involve a bug that caused a Catalyst 5500 core switch to crash, taking out our entire network.

Cisco support wiki on said bug.

I’ve been hosting this site on a Xen host in the UK for the past year – it was cheaper than running the server in-house, and the uplink bandwidth is certainly more than the 1 Mbit/s that my home ADSL is capable of.  However, in the past 6 months or so, I’ve noticed a distinct degredation of service, evidenced by the fact that I’ve raised support tickets on

• June 21st
• June 29th
• September 8th
• September 9th
• September 18th
• September 19th
• October 17th
• October 27th
• October 29th

Pretty much every one of those tickets has been ‘My Xen instance is unreachable’.  At least two of them are from disk issues on the underlying server, several have been file-system write errors in the Xen instance.

On the other hand, another Xen instance I take care of lives on a US Xen hosting facility.  It’s been running since May, and I’ve not had to raise a single ticket about it.

So, goodbye CheapVPS, hello Slicehost (and here’s hoping the Rackspace buyout doesn’t affect them negatively).

There were only a few hiccups with the migration too – primarily with maildrop.  Forgot to install the courier-authlib-devel package before compiling maildrop, so it insisted on reading /etc/passwd instead of the database that everything else refers to for e-mail.

For the longest time, my understanding was that Exchange only allowed ’send on behalf of’ through the delegation interface (and thus stamped in the message headers).  Turns out that if an admin with sufficient rights accesses the Security of another account, they can add the ‘Send As’ option to a listed object (ie, account).  Learn something new every day.