About setgetweb.com
My name is Michael Pareene (Curriculum Vitae) (PDF). This site contains tech notes collected from several decades as an IT business consultant, mostly in the UNIX-based middleware sphere. Email me at michael.pareene@gmail.com.
Nov 1, 2024
Modern IT project management practices in Fortune 500 companies differ, but the most common practice I have seen is to assign a project manager who will cheerfully admit they know nothing about the underlying technology they are managing, but instead, purport to have mystical management skills that the 120+ IQ technical team members do not. Their management skills consist of attending meetings with other "managers", then relaying garbled word salad reports to upper level management. Elon Musk, took over Twitter in 2023 and trimmed 90% of the workforce by eliminating just these sort of useless positions. SpaceX is able to launch massive rockets at a fraction of the cost of NASA launches by eliminating "managers" who know nothing about physics and engineering.
Oct 31, 2024
Android malware FakeCall can reroute calls intended for banks to attacker-controlled numbers.
Oct 10, 2024
Today's soundtrack: Tomaso Albinoni - 12 Concertos For Oboe & Strings
Recently I had to remediate a man-in-the-middle exploit where a white-hat hacker used a BurpSuite proxy to install a certificate on their browser. Doing this allowed them to intercept and decrypt requests. In this case they were able to intercept attachments submitted to the site and, and replace them with their own files. To remediate a server-side validation script was implemented which looped through the destination directory. If an invalid file was found, it was moved to a quarantine directory. This was a quick solution that took less than an hour to write and implement. The long-term solution will be to create a hash of the submitted file so that it never lands on the destination.
Freeform architecture
Pages on this site are written using a vi text editor. Content is marked up with tags and linked in index.html pages. Having UNIX-based text files allows the use of shell scripts to mass manipulate text and tagging. Scripts are used to do things like shorten verbosity, add formatting, automatically generate inline links to other content, and join lines.
Java performance tuning
A long-lived and oomprehensive site: http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/
Project Gutenberg random books feature
Physical libraries and bookstores offer serendipitous browsing. Project Gutenberg's All Books (in random order) duplicates some of that experience. I have been idling there, being served books like canapes on a tray. Some books chosen include:
- A History of the Old English Letter Foundries by Talbot Baines Reed
- Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930
- Exiles of the Three Red Moons by Carl Selwyn
- Fairies and Fusiliers by Robert Graves
- Scientific American December 14, 1878
Webb Telescope Images
The Webb Telescope images are illuminating. I am re-reading Poul Anderson's story of reluctant intergalactic travelers, Tau Zero, published in 1970. He would have had much to say about this new view into the deepness of the sky.
Legacy documentation
A person told me recently that one of the reasons they appreciate this site is because it retains documentation for long deprecated technologies. Because the information has been annotated over the years, I often find the information I need in the archives for older versions of software.
AssemblyLines
Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) AssemblyLines are used for data transformation and DB loads.
Tradition
Traditional architecture still has a place in the cloud
Complexity is is entropy
Comprehensive article from Infoworld surveying the modern software stack and the increased level of complexity inherent in today's systems.
JavaScript frameworks
Good overview of the The 10 most important JavaScript frameworks of the past decade.
WebSEAL
Some WebSEAL notes
IBM MQ
Reviewing interoperation with IBM MQ
Tips
A couple of random tips...
- To save an html as a PDF and preserve links, open the page with an Opera browser and "Save as PDF".
- To delete all text between two patterns...
sed -n '1,/<body>/p;/<h1/,$p' $i
What type of cloud to choose
Public, Private, Hybrid, Multicloud, Distributed Cloud - Which one is right for you?
Configure traditional WAS on OpenShift
For info on how to move WebSphere ND to cloud, see: Cloud Pak for Applications: Operational Modernization Solution. Also see, tutorial on how to Configure traditional WebSphere session persistence on OpenShift. Here are steps to create customized, curated container images of both traditional WebSphere Application Server (tWAS).
Azure Red Hat OpenShift
Here is a comprehensive set of examples for implementing Azure Red Hat OpenShift leveraging WebSphere Liberty.
According to Forbes, the current highest-paying certifications are Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect, CISM – Certified Information Security Manager and AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
IBM is splitting it’s Global Services division into a new company in order to concentrate on Cloud. It appears WebSphere Application Server is considered as part of their Cloud offerings:
www.ibm.com/cloud/websphere-application-platform/
IBM’s detailed documentation on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud has lots of practical examples and inline links.
Reading Kurt Cagle’s article Beyond Agile: The Studio Model.
One significant flaw in Agile is that it is programmer-centric and task-oriented. However, a significant portion of any project relies upon existing resources and SMEs who serve to to curate, annotate and document the institutional information that are necessary for projects to succeed. They are the ones that end up documenting code and make information consistent, findable and describable within a common metadata framework. These are ongoing processes, which IMHO have always fallen outside of most Agile frameworks, yet as enterprise consistency becomes an ever larger requirement, the role of librarians and data stewards becomes much more pressing.
Getting caught up on Job Manager tooling, which lets one asynchronously run WebSphere and host-level jobs on remote servers.
Here are some notes on a portal performance tuning project I completed a few years ago.
Some notes on common DB2 database commands.
I have posted some notes on a security hardening session. Notes are specific to WebSphere Portal v8, but are generally applicable to other apps deployed to WAS.
See WebSphere security hardening
We can display the name of the cell, node, and server in front of the output for the ps -ef command by setting the cell custom property…
com.ibm.websphere.management.launcher.options = displayServerInFront
The IBM DataPower XI52 appliance provides an ESB backbone that facilitates (brokers) communication between services. Features include…
| Protocol virtualization |
Communication between parties who use different protocols such as http, https, ftp, MQ. ESB bridges (converts) these protocols. |
| Message format virtualization |
For example, one party sends XML (SOAP) message, ESB converts to JSON, which is sent to backend. |
| Endpoint virtualization |
WSDL services that used to exist on servers can be moved to ESB. |
| XML attack security |
Including DoS, MMXDos, and other attacks. |
| Configuration driven interface |
Less code to write |
| XML processing at wire speed. |
Versus server-based ESB solutions that operate at software speed. |
Here are some basic wsadmin script examples.
Here are some project notes created when I was the WebSphere Commerce administrator for a large Fortune 500 retailer. The notes discuss integrating WebSphere eXtreme Scale DataPower XC10 appliance with WebSphere Commerce.
If you need a quick and easy network sniffer give snort a try.
We can leverage SSH public-key authentication between hosts to enable all sorts of useful functionality, including…
- Password-less login from HostA to HostB
- Ability to execute remote commands from HostA on HostB
- We can automatically administer an entire network of servers from a central server
I once set up a large WebSphere Commerce site for a Fortune 500 retailer that used this procedure to remotely execute various commands, including stopping/starting, and generating reports for, eXtreme Scale caching.
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