Practical Business Continuity For The Small Organization
For the small business owner, should the power going out mean you can’t make money? Should the computer system going down for 20 minutes mean a restaurant can’t take or cook orders any longer? Some basic level of preparation for anything other than ideal circumstances and commonsense needs to be…
ShrewSoft VPN Client Has Problem After Windows 7 Laptop Sleeps with VPN Active
A few months ago I switched from using Cisco’s QuickVPN software to the ShrewSoft VPN Client for Windows. I’m not going to get into the issues that I had with QuickVPN-it wasn’t very reliable. I’ve had ShrewSoft VPN for Windows v2.1.7 connecting to a Cisco RV082 VPN router. ShrewSoft provides…
SOA Specs Visualized
In a previous blog post, I listed a number of SOA Specs and Security Specs that I thought were important to be familiar with when working with DataPower and other SOA technologies. In this post, I made a quick (and dirty) Visio diagram that I tend to draw up on a whiteboard when I’m at a new client…
SOAP Web Service Mockup tutorial on DataPower
It is often the case that a DataPower developer will have work to do, but does not yet have a backend Service Provider to point the DataPower service at. In general, anything beyond trivial examples will need to point at something that returns a valid response. In order to satisfy this requirement,…
Who Owns DataPower Within An Organization?
The definition of the word ownership has varying meanings across organizations, but there is always a group that retains control of the technology. It’s typically the group that sponsored the adoption of the technology and owns day-to-day support of it. But, sometimes, the technology initiative…
DataPower and Terminal Servers…
DataPower has a serial port console that is used during initial bootstrap of the appliance, recovering from problems, and certain configuration changes. Having access to the serial console is the only feasible approach to resolving certain issues that arise with any appliance (or piece of network…
OSI 7-Layer Network Model
I’ve been playing with Cisco switches and routers recently at home to get a handle on VLANs-more about VLANs later. Some people I know who have gotten involved in DataPower started out in system administration or networking and worked their way up the technology stack to SOA Appliances (WebSphere…
What is an Appliance? What is a SOA Appliance?
I suppose I’m switching gears a bit here back towards something almost philosophical rather than my usual concrete technical info So be it. In the last six months, I’ve been at several clients sites that are using SOA appliances to build XML Gateway and ESB patterns. I answer quite a few client…
HTTP(S) URLs & Context Roots
What is a URL? What is a context root? It’s helpful to understand these things when writing or working with web applications.
Capturing Network Communication Between Two Processes On the Same Machine…
Have you ever run snoop on Solaris or tcpdump on Linux or AIX and discovered that these tools cannot capture IP-based communication that occurs between two processes on the same machine? Or, Wireshark (formerly, Ethereal) on Windows? Only to discover the same limitation?
Capturing JVM TCP Traffic
Any time you have a distributed application, there is network communication involved. Capturing this network traffic can be instrumental in diagnosing and solving problems. Generally, to capturing network traffic, superuser privledges, timing, and a bit of luck is needed. Often, the appropriate…
Java Networking API vs. The C library networking API
The original article is located here. In this article, I described what was involved in writing a server program in the C language. The details are not important, but I wanted to compare the details that are exposed in this relatively simple C network programming example with the equivalent Java…