The month of September was relatively quiet. There was several end of season Triathlon, Biking and Running events this month, and we were proud to be out supporting our local community with Rotary at the St Thomas Railway City Road Races.  It looks like October will find the Panda wondering around the Niagara Region and New Haven to work with some clients, and that will give us the opportunity to meet with some new Rotary clubs!

Do you know what Rotary does in your community?  The St Thomas Railway City Rotary Club which I am apart of is a relatively small club, but we are active in our community doing service projects and raising monies for deserving programs while at the same time being a part of a fantastic group of people that are committed to making the community a great place to live.  For example I am spear heading a little project to sell Teddy Bears at our local hockey teams home games in November, to raise money for Christmas Care.  Last year we sold almost 75 bears half of which were donated back, which allowed us to donate almost a thousand dollars and forty bears to Christmas Care.  The best part is we did all this in partnership with the local St Thomas Junior B Stars, and we got to go and pack the boxes for the families in need at Christmas Care.  It may not sound like a lot but knowing that one child had a great Christmas, makes it well worth the effort. If you would like to buy a bear to donate this year let me know!  I hope to have  a facebook donation link available very soon.

Till next month……

There is one big rabbit hole out there when it comes to security, and that happens to be around SSL encryption. In regards to PeopleSoft that rabbit hole is not only huge it is also highly undocumented. There is several reasons for this, however, the most common reason is that SSL encryption has nothing to do with PeopleSoft as an application — yes, I know what you are going to say, but….

In January of this year, Oracle released a critical patch update in which they highly recommend that the SSL v3.0 encryption should no longer be used due to vulnerabilities. It is recommended that everybody use TLS v1.2. For the longest time TLS v1.2 was not support by any browser except IE, however, all major browsers now fully support TLS v1.2. Click here to See SSL/TLS Support By Browser.

Oracle is constantly putting out updates and critical patches, and the latest Patch Set Updates for WebLogic 12x can be found on the My Oracle Support (MOS) Document:  1470197.1

Weblogic by default supports all protocol versions (which is dependent on the JSSE provider and JDK versions being used) – Click Here to See Supported Versions

In order to limit Weblogic 12 encryption protocols to just the TLS protocols (disable SSL v3.0), you need to add the following parameter to your WebLogic PIA instance startup:

-Dweblogic.security.SSL.protocolVersion=TLS1

If you are running in windows as a service you will want to modify the service parameter CmdLine in the Registry Editor, if you are running from the startPIA in Windows or Linux you can append the parameter to the start command in the shell script or batch program.