Smart Panda Newsletter – November 2015

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

Smart Panda - Newsletter Postman

Well would you look at that — December is here. I remember when I was 13 driving on a back country road with my cool Uncle, and I told him “I wish things would just go faster, this school year is taking forever to finish.”  His response was “enjoy the time moving slow, because every year will go by faster and faster, and one day you will look up and wonder where the heck the time went.”  It is a good plan to look up and really assess what it going on around you. I was reminded of that just today by a friend who just looked at me with “that look” as I was about to go on about an absolutely stupid problem that doesn’t deserve a second of my time, but yet I let it consume a lot of my time lately — the lesson was simple “focus on what is important.”

Are you focusing on what is important? Do you need a Panda to give you “that look?”

Smart Panda Newsletter – October 2015

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Message from Wade

Smart Panda - Newsletter Postman

Can somebody slow this world down! It just feels like yesterday this year started, and now we are facing down Christmas.  October found the Panda unbelievably busy finishing up several upgrades, and bringing on several new clients.  The new web hosting, domain and email services are coming together and everyday we are bringing more and more people into the the world of reliable and effective hosting.  As well, we continue to have great success with our custom hosting running PeopleSoft Upgrade Labs, Training & Demonstration environments and PeopleSoft ERP Production environments.

Something I am recommending to everybody I talk to these days is to discuss your options with a trusted advisor. The Smart Panda has been able to help many clients this year achieve great results for their business/enterprises just by enabling them to have the understanding that is needed to make Smart Infrastructure decisions. Do you want/need to have that conversation?

Panda + Community October 2015

The Smart Panda - St Thomas Railway City Rotary BearsWell, it would appear that the lead up to the Christmas season is when the Panda seems to get really involved with the community.  This past month we were able to get out and help a local group by installing a new floor in one of their apartments.  Next week The Panda will be out with our Rotary Club assisting Local Legion 41 collect donations for Poppies in support of our Veterans – Remember To Remember.

Since Christmas is right around corner, Christmas Care was out talking with the Rotary Club last week, and we are excited to working with them again to help ensure families that are having tough times will have a great Christmas.  This year the Rotary Club will be selling teddy bears as we did last year, with all proceeds going to support Christmas Care, and the best part is in many cases people that buy the bears also donate them.  Last year we had almost 40 bears that went to families to put smiles on kids faces.  This year the goal is 100.

If you would like to buy a bear online and have the bear donated to Christmas Care Click:

Once the bears are all sold, we will continue to work with Christmas Care and package up food and gifts into the over 1500+ hampers that will be going out to the community.  It is a great community project that brings out the good in everyone and puts smiles on many faces.

Another project we are excited to continuing this year is working with Inn Out of The Cold, last year The Rotary Club and The Panda donated a pile of clothing, thermal blankets and made several meals to help out folks that are homeless and in need.  The first meals were served this past weekend, and The Panda will be in there doing dishes soon.

Till next month……

Smart Panda - Rotary - Christmas Care - Donation - Puck Drop Smart Panda - Rotary - Christmas Care - Selling Bears Smart Panda - Rotary - Floor Installation Smart Panda - Rotary - Floor Installation -W&J

Weblogic: Wildcard Host Name Verification

Smart Panda - WildcardWildcard SSL + PeopleSoft

Out of the box you can do just about anything with WebLogic, however, when you get into some of the specifics and try to tie it into an application like PeopleSoft you can run into some interesting quirks.  I personally really like wildcard SSL certificates because it cuts down on a huge administrative headache that can come from trying to manage certificates for every “name”  that needs to be managed.  In PeopleSoft you can have dozens of servers and it can get to be an administrative nightmare.

WebLogic allows you to store and reference the wildcard certificate in you keystore, however, Wildcard Host Name Verification will fail with default settings.  If you do a quick google search you will turn up several posts that explain to simply “ignore” wildcard host name verification.  I am not a fan of just “ignoring” things.  So you could simply add the following to the start command of Weblogic:

-Dweblogic.security.SSL.ignoreHostnameVerification=true

However, I found what I consider a better option which is to set the validation to a custom wildcard host name verification with a delivered public class for WebLogic Security: SSLWLSHostnameVerifier, which can be called for hostname verification and will apply wildcard host name verification checks. This wildcard host name verification is instantiated by the WebLogic hostname verifier wrapper that checks for proxies, expectedName, etc. It obtains this hostname verifier class name from the SSLMBean or the hostname verifier property.

Smart Panda - Weblogic Hostname VerificationIn the WebLogic Console:

you can change the advanced SSL properties:

Hostname Verification:

Custom HostName Verification

Custom Hostname Verifier:

weblogic.security.utils.SSLWLSWildcardHostnameVerifier

This will do a check of the peer certificate of the SSL session’s peer certificate SubjectDN CommonName attribute supports wildcarding, the CommonName attribute must meet the following:

  • the CN must have at least two dot (‘.’) characters
  • the CN must start with “*.”
  • the CN can have only one “*” character

What JAVA Version is being Used

Smart Panda - JAVAAlmost every piece of software installed these days seems to have some java version included with it. So sometimes when you are trying to run an application you could potentially be running the wrong java version based on the paths that are looked up for the java executable.

 

 

Smart Panda - Idea

In windows from the command prompt you can issue the command:

where java

In Linux you can issue the command:

which java

The windows command will show you all the locations where it finds java, which from my tests it is sequenced from the first location it will find it to the last location it will find it.