Subbu Allamaraju has written a very good description of the tricks HTTP 1.1 goes to utilise connections more efficiently.
Reading his article makes very clear that persistent connections are quite tricky and developing new code dealing with the topic requires careful thought.
And, of course, troubleshooting persistent connections is quite hard. Ethereal comes quite handy in here, but even that does not know how to extract individual parts of conversations. Does anybody know free tools that work in a network sniffing mode (not proxy mode)?
Interesting - and at comments threshold 4, meaninful - discussion on slashdot whether vendors need root access to customer’s equipment/OS. Eventually, it diverges into dumb vendors vs. dumb customers.
At BEA, we don’t actually need root access to the system. In fact, you have to go out of your way to run at port 80 or with other root related issues. Comes with a Java territory, I guess. In fact, we prefer not to login into the customer system at all, but rather collect logs and analyse them on our own machines.
Luke Dewavrin is writing about what it takes to get Weblogic use Microsoft Active Directory as an Authentication Provider.
He also mentions couple of issues that people get burned by the first time they use WLS Security Providers architecture.
Specifically, he talks about the need to set JAAS flags to “Sufficient” or “Optional”. Let me reinforce that; the flag need to be changed before the provider setup is saved. Otherwise, you most probably will not be able to restart WLS instance again.
Doug Kaye is Doug Kaye is how to make his very reputable ITConversations podcast website actually bring in money.
For me, ITConversations is the only podcast that I listen to reliably as I listen for content, not entertainment. Pop!Tech series were absolutely riveting, especially WorldChanging.com and BioMimicry.
So, following is my idea which I was thinking about for a while and can see having worth beyond one site’s commercial success.
Very interesting story of what happens when built in defaults have silent limits. In this story, each ADF application modules (whatever they are- WayBackMachine archive) needed a cookie with default configuration. This silently runs into spec limitations.
Fortunately, Weblogic does not generate multiple cookies by default, though you could certainly assign one for each of the webapp.
For me as a support person, it is fascinating to read how other support people solve customer’s problems.