Thoughts Electrique

As you may remember from my last blogpost I’m currently setting up a new hosting Server. Since this server will also host some OpenCms and JEE sites I need to set up a Servlet Container. In almost all of my projects until today Tomcat was successfully used for this purpose. Be it stand alone or embedded in a JEE application server (e.g. JBoss).

I must admit that I always had some kind of a love-hate relationship with Tomcat. The classloader had some bad issues when reloading a webapplication too often and often killed the complete server. Taking down all of the other webapplications too. Although this has gotten a lot better recently it’s still bothering me a bit.

Since I had some time after my last project I started investigating other open source alternatives. I often heard of Jetty, praised for it’s speed and simplicity, it seemed like a great alternative and I played around with it a bit. I really liked it since it was simple to use and easy to deploy but as I started to google for things like performance measurements or how to use it with a security manager I didn’t really found a lot of documentation (compared to Tomcat) and the performance doesn’t really doesn’t seem to differ from Tomcats.

So I’m once again going the Tomcat route. It has a big community and is even used in military and government organizations. It’s really not a technology decision (although I think Tomcat is solid) but more political thinking.

It will also save me some time which I can invest in trying out other technologies. Meow…

Since I’m currently setting up a new server for hosting purposes I want to share some of my favourite sysadmin tools and practices.

The first featured tool is the shoreline firewall or shorewall. You can find the project at: http://www.shorewall.net/

Shorewall basically is a set of nice configuration files for iptables. Another benefit of shorewall is that it has no runtime part. You just fire up the tool, it configures your iptables and quits. This reduces the load and increases security. Additionally to the technical features there is one thing that makes shorewall really stand out: It has extensive, well-written and understandable documentation. You rarely find a use-case which is not already described in the documentation.

Read on to find out how to set up shorewall in minutes.

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It’s often the case that you need icons and graphics for your own applications, but there is no real style guide available and the customer just wants something decent and coherent. I recently started using the jQuery UI wizard to create the look and feel for my entire application. So far I am very pleased with the results.

You can even create the CSS and images using a wizard: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller

The resulting themes are dual licensed under the GPL and MIT license.