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.

[ CIO Today noticed microrebooting research paper.]1 While I agree that the paper is very interesting, I think there are some holes in it that were not explored (or at least not explained). Specifically: Early in the article, memory leak and resource leaks are named as the problems solved by rebooting. From what I can see, microrebooting will only solve the issues where those resources/objects are held by instances that are cleared on microreboot.