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. This was my first certification and I will say the test is very difficult testing you on every obscure area of Puppet, and it changes a lot between versions. If you’re studying for this exam, you need to practically read all their documentation on top of training and having real life experience. Their are study guides, I also just recently obtained certification as an IBM Certified System Administrator for WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment V8.5.5 and Liberty Profile. Mostly because I’ve been working with it heavily for a while so the certification was just a formality, I barely studied for that one.

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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.

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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. Think of it like a transport provider for messages within WebSphere that allows for asynchronous communication between applications. One application can place a message on a bus, and all other applications connected to the bus can retrieve the message and perform some work on them, or there is some mediation done before hand. You can have one application handle a web request and put a message on a bus where a cluster of applications that can handle the request will see it and one of them will grab the message and handle the work needed for the request. This is very useful for spreading the workload among a cluster of application servers while ensuring high availability.

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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.

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