From Linux to Windows: The Series
A new security initiative from corporate has forced a change in how I do things, at least on my company laptop.
I’ve been running some form of Unix on my work desktop and laptop for something like 8 years now. CentOS Linux (a free Red Hat Enterprise clone) has been the latest distro, and probably [...]
500 error on logging in to oiddas
Had this happen yesterday in an Oracle 10g Application Server environment. Got to the DAS Console front page (http://sso.example.com/oiddas:7777/oiddas) and hit with a “500 Internal Server Error: Contact your System Administrator”.
Being said system administrator, I did what anyone in my place would. I restarted the SSO server. NG. Then I did what I should have [...]
Using OpenLDAP schema in Red Hat Directory
Just the other day I finally got started working on building a real personal address book backend in the home LDAP database. Almost immediately I realized the base schema was going to have to be extended because there were no attributes for date of birth or anniversary, two data points that would be useful to [...]
nmap is your friend
One of my favorite tools for tracking down abusive LDAP clients is nmap .
Here’s the “standard” command line “SYN Stealth Scan” with O/S detection (invoked as root):
nmap -sS -O -PI -PT 10.0.44.56
And here’s your typical output:
Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2010-02-17 13:49 EST
Interesting ports on 10.0.44.56:
Not shown: 1690 closed ports
PORT [...]
OTN downloads using wget
Already posted on how to download patches from Oracle support.
This is a variation on that theme for those of us who have been in this business longer than 3 minutes and are looking for more efficient ways to do things.
OTN (Oracle Technology Network) has a pretty, if not always easy to navigate, browser interface for [...]
Use wget to download Oracle patches directly to the server
My colleague Mike Zeece found an article on Michael Brown’s blog that describes how to do this.
Since Oracle went to their horrendous Flash-centric support app getting the bits onto your servers usually involves downloading to a desktop first (because real servers don’t run Flash enabled web browsers) and then wasting additional time sftp-ing them over [...]
Clearing Solaris memory segments and semaphores
Sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean.
When there’s a bunch of apps eating away at memory eventually something will tank. At that point just shutting stuff down may not be enough, especially when you’ve got to resort to the kill command to make them dead. Very often all those memory segments and semaphores [...]