An Apache Tomcat server, I administrate, used to go away every now and then some time ago. To investigate the issue, I connected to the server via SSH, restarted it and monitored the log for a while. Tomcat ran well during this time. I disconnected and went home. Then the phone ringed, server had gone [...]

Before there was OpenJDK, Linux distributions often lacked Java support at all or provided gcj as a very unpleasant alternative. A project that aimed at this issue was jpackage, who provided Source-RPMS to put Sun´s java downloads into sane RPMs. Unfortunately they do not seem to provide support for current versions of Sun´s java, now [...]

Recently I had to debug some SSL certificate issues. Task was to use a chained certificate file in Java. I imported the files using keytool with the usual steps. Unfortunately it didn´t work.

Sun Java got added a great utility named jconsole with version 5.0. Basically it is a Swing-based JMX console. It shows a lot of the inner state of JVM processes.