devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

I’m currently working on setting-up a two-tiered clustered environment on some brand spanking new Dell servers running Windows Server 2003, and ran into a little problem which I’m sure will creep up for other people. I installed ColdFusion MX 7.0 in multi-server mode, got an instance of it all configured, but could not get to the JRun Administrator.

I checked the JRun logs and apparently port 8000 (which is what the JRun Administrator uses) was already in use. To see what was using port 8000, I used trusty netstat from the command line:

netstat -a -n -o > c:\ports.txt

This command with basically lists all ports and IP’s which are bound, the process ID which they are bound to, and pipes it all into a text file to make it easier to read. From there I saw the following entry:

TCP 0.0.0.0:8000 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 1848

This told me that process 1848 was binding port 8000. I ran the Windows Task Manager (”taskmgr” at the command line), turned on the display of Process Id’s on in the Options, and found that a process named omaws32.exe was bound to that port.

After Googling for that process name, apparently it’s related to the Dell Open Management server. After talking to one of our sys admins about this (because I’d never ran into this problem before on any other Dell servers), apparently Dell had switched to using this port for their Open Management software recently rather than having to run it through IIS. This is according to him at least– I didn’t research it myself.

Being that I don’t need to use the JRun Admin that often, I just decided to bind it to a different port and call it good. You can do this by editing the XML attribute:

<attribute name="port">8000</attribute>

Located in the file:
%JRunHome%\servers\admin\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml

I changed the port to 8350, restarted the JRun Admin Service, and it was good to go. Hopefully this will be of some help to someone else who runs into the same problem.

Mark Cuban comments on the next big p2p case making it’s way to court, MGM vs. Grokster on his blog. I think this is the most facinating part of the post:

Thats what is ahead of us if Grokster loses. Thats what happens if the RIAA is able to convince the Supreme Court of the USA that rather than the truth, which is , Software doesnt steal content, people steal content, they convince them that if it can impact the music business, it should be outlawed because somehow it will. It doesnt matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, EVERY SINGLE TIME. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. So , the real reason of this blog. To let everyone know that the EFF and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. So now the truth has been told. This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me. Mark Cuban and my little content company. Its about our ability to use future innovations to compete vs their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. its that simple.

He’s certainly an interesting character and seems to generally be putting those .com dollars to good work. I actually worked on a site/company which he owns, NetIdentity, once upon a time. I also helped out the guys admining that site with Linux issues a couple of times, but never met Cuban or anything like that since there was a layer or two of people between him and said company.

I was just surfing around Macromedia DevNet and noticed they were plugging Sean’s blog on the first page. Given some of the latest events with employee dismissals and what-not over blogging related issues, I find the idea that Macromedia is embracing their employees’ personal blogs to be very refreshing.

There are certainly all kinds of employee blogs out there, but it seems that most of them get filtered through the PR department before being posted. Said blogs also seem to usually be some half-bit blogging incarnation posted in a dusty corner of a corporate website. However it’s quite obvious that many of the Macromedia employee’s maintain their own personal blogs. It’s pretty empowering to read content by employees as well as engage people in discussions via comments and e-mail who develop the product that you use on a daily basis. Every now and then you may even notice something you’ve mentioned in such a discussion or blog post get implemented as a hotfix or new feature on down the road.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d give an ‘atta boy to the great community Macromedia has been building in the past few years, as well as keeping from becoming one of those big machine-like corporations who focus on the dollar rather than customer satisfaction and fanaticism at the end of the day.

I came across The Regulator today which looks to be a fairly cool Regular Expression editor. Unfortunately it’s Windows only, and it requires the .NET Framework as well. However, it does have built-in searching to RegExLib.com which I find to be fairly cool and useful.

I’m currently integrating Razor into my e-mail setup on my new server (more on my new e-mail hotness later) and had a strange error when trying to get it setup:


bash-2.05b$ razor-admin -create
bash-2.05b$ razor-admin -register -user postmaster@harvesthisspambot.com
Error 202 while performing register, aborting.


Turns-out you need to run the razor-admin with a -discover first if you come across this error. In general it’s some sort of network error.


bash-2.05b$ razor-admin -discover
bash-2.05b$ razor-admin -create
bash-2.05b$ razor-admin -register -user postmaster@harvesthisspambot.com
Register successful. Identity stored in /var/amavis/.razor/identity-postmaster@harvesthisspambot.com


Seems like there are always several small “gotchas” when setting-up a fresh Unix box from scratch, but once you’re done with it it’s pure gold. I’ll be sporadically publishing a few more of these as I work on my new server in hopes someone in the future will have better luck finding a particular problem on Google than I’ve had.

Lately at work I’ve been doing a performance analysis of a product which has been in development for quite some time. Well, quite some time by ColdFusion standards at least. The particular piece I developed which I’m testing uses the ColdFusion 7 event gateway to essentially fire off threads which each run individual long running processes. As an aside, one thing that I absolutely love about the Event Gateway feature is the ability to control the number of running threads for a given gateway instance, as well as the ability to queue events beyond the number of active threads. This is a very nice feature and keeps me from having to somehow manually manage that which would be quite the conundrum.

Anyhow, during said testing, I’ve uncovered several instances of thread unsafe code which to me is no surprise given the rather large code base this product currently occupies. Surprisingly to me a couple of the instances of thread unsafe code were commonly distributed UDF’s from CFLib from well known people in the CF community. I went to check the UDF’s in question out again on CFLib and they been updated and fixed, so there is no reason for me to really point out anything specific (and I’m not that sort of person anyhow.. I’d contact them in private about it). In reality the versions of UDF’s contained in the code base I’m working with could of been up to a couple of years old. That said, if you have some UDF’s in your code base that you didn’t write yourself, you might want to see if they’ve been updated since adding them in.

This testing process which has uncovered thread unsafe code before actually doing a formal load test analysis has certainly had me thinking though. Using the Event Gateway feature seems like a really good way to perhaps implement automated thread safe unit testing through something such as CFCUnit, without needing to do a full load test to uncover thread unsafe code. For instance this would be especially advantageous if your organization depends on some sort of 3rd party to do load testing; it would be a good idea to take care of any code upfront which was not thread safe. Anyhow, just a fleeting thought really; unfortunately I don’t have the time at the moment to pursue this to see how feasible it is.

Just a quick note while I block port 80 at the firewall to try out some Apache config changes and install a caching plugin for WordPress. I’ve been Slashdotted, so this is going to be a bumpy ride…

Let’s hope my little Celeron 466 and DSL service can handle the load after some tuning.

This was on Slashdot yesterday; in case you didn’t catch it, Marc Lucovsky a 16 year veteran of Microsoft who wrote many core pieces of Windows NT recently defected to Google. He’s been speaking out on the faults of Microsoft lately, and in particular I find the confirmation of the weak roll-out of the .NET Framework on client machines particularly interesting.

It’s also yet another data point on the notion of how modern web applications are changing the view of what modern software really is and should be. Now if I could just convince people that I don’t work on “web pages”…

It seems that CFEclipse is getting pretty popular– the latest nightly build nightly builds have already been downloaded over 5,100 times which is pretty impressive to me. I’ve been using it for around a year now and it certainly makes me happy. When my Java-fu is finally up to par, I do have a couple of ideas I’d like to try out in it for sure…

I love Eclipse– I also use it for Java and C; soon C++ as well.