2016

2016 has been another crazy year for me, and 2017 is just as crazy. I’ve been putting off updating my site for a while (a whole year). So here is a summary update of just some of the things I’ve been working on for 2016 and the first few months of 2017. Certifications: I am now a Puppet Certified Professional 2016, I guess if its not obvious, I’ve been working even more heavily with Puppet, going to training, writing modules, etc. [Read More]

Message engines & Service Integration Buses

One of the components that I deal with in my work with WebSphere that seems nebulous to some conceptually, is the service integration bus and it’s corresponding message engine. Especially when you’re first beginning to learn about WebSphere and JMS. This concept is not unique to WebSphere and similar implementations can be found in JBoss, but my experience with it rests mostly with WebSphere. A service integration bus lets applications exchange messages between each other within a cell. [Read More]

PyDev and wsadmin unite

Those of us that use WebSphere Application Server in our environments as our J2EE application server have a very powerful tool to administrate or automate tasks from the command line, wsadmin. wsadmin is a command line utility that allows you to issue commands in a single server or network deployment (multiple servers in a single administrative domain or “cell”). If you are reading this you probably know all about it and its support for Python, or Jython environment as a language to issue commands and run scripts to handle a variety of tasks. [Read More]

Reverse XOR'ing WebSphere Passwords

Some of the lessons I’ve learned from the Matasano Crypto Challenge has already had unexpected practical application for a common issue I encounter at work. Sometimes, people forget things, don’t document things especially in dev environments (hopefully not so much in production), one of those things is passwords, passwords for database accounts, or for an account that has some authorization the application needs. If a dev forgets a password or can’t find where it was documented, it’s many times better to just recover the password, rather then reset the password, especially if the account is used by the application in local dev environments, etc. [Read More]