gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

At yesterday’s Google I/O Keynote Google announced that Google Compute Engine is now open for all (that want to give Google their credit card).

This is a really interesting development, given that Amazon Web Services can definitely use some competition, but I’m a little missing the innovative features. The command line tools like gcutil look very neat and they support Debian wheezy, so that’s definitely a plus :)

In the last years I’ve mostly done my small personal-time development projects on VMware Fusion instances, but I was also looking at what benefits I can get from using the cloud. Right now there aren’t too many providers that have hourly billing that is a good fit for just firing up VMs when you need them and then shutting them down again. I’ll definitely add GCE to my list of services to try, but I’ll have to test out DigitalOcean first :)

To import a Google Contacts vCard file export into a retro Nokia phone (6300 in this case) with Gammu there are quite a few hoops to jump through.

First, don’t bother with the USB serial link. It won’t work with complex vCard files as apparently the AT serial connection won’t support multiple phone numbers per contact. Yes, it’s that retro. So setup a bluetooth connection and it will work beautifully. I used the following gammurc:

gpoul@debian:~$ cat .gammurc
[gammu1]
port=<NOKIA-MAC>
connection=bluerfphonet
name=Nokia 6300

Now to actually gammu restore with the contacts.vcf you exported from Google Contacts you also want to do this:

sed -i.orig "/^TEL;/s/[[:space:]-]//g;/^ADR;/d" contacts.vcf

Now you’re all set, but you might want to check that the number of imported contacts actually matches what you get back from gammu getallmemory just to be sure you’re not running into more problems than I did :-)

Last week at IMPACT in Las Vegas we announced WebSphere Applicaiton Server V8.5.5. While most of the changes were for Libery profile, there were quite a few changes to Base and ND editions as well.

The following are the most important changes for me:

• Liberty profile now supports the complete Java EE Web Profile
• Liberty profile is now also available as WAS Liberty Core – can be optionally used with a collective controller from WAS ND and is limited to only two load distributed servers.
• Liberty collective controller is available on WAS ND or WAS for zOS
• WebSphere eXtreme Scale is now also delivered as a part of WAS V8.5.5, although entitlements vary by edition. WAS ND includes full entitlements, but if you plan to use a remote data grid, you want to purchase XC10 or WXS.

A full list of capabilities and changes can be found in the announcement letter.

Last week at IMPACT in Las Vegas we announced IBM MessageSight, an appliance that can be placed in a DMZ that handles outbound & inbound messages at scale. While primarily useful for machine-to-machine (m2m) communication using MQTT it also handles WebSocket connections for web applications.

While there are quite a number of communication options an important concept to understand is that this appliance is not a queue manager or broker. It’s basically a messaging gateway that makes it possible to only connect a small number of devices to internal IT systems, but still gather or push messages to millions of devices. A full list of its key capabilities can be found in the announcement letter.

For analyzing the CMS collector of Oracle JVMs the posts by Jon Masamitsu about the Phases of CMS and its PrintGCDetails Output are very useful. I’d also recommend to look at the Java HotSpot Garbage Collection documentation, but I’ve not found it very comprehensive in the past and not as easy to use as our IBM Java Diagnostics Guide.

Also be aware that some of the behavior you’re seeing in verbose gc output might be because of the characteristics of the underlying platform. I’ve seen JVMs with large amounts of threads take a long time to be stopped by the collector on Solaris on Niagara boxes, so don’t assume different behavior between platforms is necessarily a defect in the GC itself.

An updated WebSphere Application Server V8.5.Next Beta is now available. The Liberty profile now includes a JMS messaging engine with support for MDBs, enhanced CDI support, federated LDAP registry support, the ability to act as an OAuth Service Provider, the ability to organize Liberty servers into collectives for clustering and administration, and more.

Internally at IBM we use BlueGroups to manage permissions for various services. It’s basically just regular LDAP groups inside of a Tivoli Directory Server. We have a web UI for managing those groups. Unfortunately the definition of managing apparently doesn’t include finding the list of groups you’re a member of. For this you need some ldapsearch trickery.

First, find the dn for your user:

$ ldapsearch -x -h bluepages.ibm.com -b ou=bluepages,o=ibm.com "(mail=NAME@CC.ibm.com)" dn

Then use that dn to find the groups you’re a member of:

$ ldapsearch -x -h bluepages.ibm.com -b ou=memberList,ou=ibmgroups,o=ibm.com "(uniqueMember=uid=SSSSSSCCC,c=CC,ou=bluepages,o=ibm.com)" dn

Reality check: Does your disaster recovery plan defy the laws of physics?

Working as a middleware admin? Then you should really check out t-rob’s latest post. This post works for any middleware you’re working with, not only MQ :-)

Want some more insight into the magic that goes on inside of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment’s dynamic clusters? Then check out the paper about A Scalable Application Placement Controller for Enterprise Data Centers.