It's that time of the year again and, since it appears that the Maya spared us, I want to share with you a couple of gists that I came up with recently that could be generally useful. Btw, there are lots of other gists on my gist.github.com profile, check them out.
If you find these script useful star them on github, drop me a comment or just share them. Once again, Merry Christmas everyone!
The first one is for Java people and is a HttpServletRequestWrapper that supports:
injection of the principal: for those cases when you use trust authentication and you are rolling your own SSO solution and/or you need to integrate with an existing SSO solution (I used it with for CAS)
supports reading of the InputStream multiple times. We all know that in a POST the request input stream can only be read once, so this will definitely help you if you need to access the post body or a request parameter in a Filter and make sure the upstream servlets/filters still work
The second gift gist is for Windows admins and is written in vbs (I even do VBS when it is necessary, now you get my twitter handle, don't you?). It is a login script that can be used in a Windows Domain to recreate Desktop links on each user logon. The configuration for each link is stored in the script as a dictionary of dictionaries and link-to-user assignment is done by adding the user to an AD group. The source is heavily commented and should be easy enough to understand for anyone who's ever programmed, even if not in vbs.
I was recently asked to recover a mirth instance whose embedded database had grown to fill all available space so this is just a note-to-self kind of post. Btw: the recovery, depending on db size and disk speed, is going to take long. The problem A 1.8 Mirth Connect instance was started, then forgotten (well neglected, actually). The user also forgot to setup pruning so the messages filled the embedded Derby database until it grew to fill all the available space on the disk. The SO is linux. The solution First of all: free some disk space so that the database can be started in embedded mode from the cli. You can also copy the whole mirth install to another server if you cannot free space. Depending on db size you will need a corresponding amount of space: in my case a 5GB db required around 2GB to start, process logs and then store the temp files during shrinking. Then open a shell as the user that mirth runs as (you're not running it as root, are you?) and cd in...
Debating whether to go no-code but worried about unclear licensing, the dreadful we-need-to-rewrite-it dram down the road or django/rails/spring boot and its relatively higher upfront cost? There's a third way: quasi-code with Apache Camel . It still amazes me how few people know about the swiss-army knife of integrations.
Updated Oct 16 2013: shadow copies, memory settings and links for further learning. Updated Nov 15 2013: shadow copies example, samba tuning. Unless you've been living under a rock you should have by now heard many stories about how awesome ZFS is and the many ways it can help with saving your bacon . The downside is that ZFS is not available (natively) for Linux because the CDDL license under which it is released is incompatible with the GPL. Assuming you are not interested in converting to one of the many Illumos distributions or FreeBSD this guide might serve you as a starting point if you are attracted by ZFS features but are reluctant to try it out on production systems. Basically in this post I note down both the tought process and the actual commands for implementing a fileserver for a small office. The fileserver will run as a virtual machine in a large ESXi host and use ZFS as the filesystem for shared data.