Sebastian Thomschke

Installing WebSphere Portal in a local network

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Posted on 6 July 2009 3 comments

Recently I had to setup some WebSphere Portal 6.1 installations in VMWares within a private network. Unfortunately the portal installer aborted with the following message “EJPIC0067E: Portal requires a fully qualified host name that is recoganized by the DNS Server.” Even when adding the fully qualified hostname to the hosts file the installer may still fail with the same message.
The workaround is to disable the hostname check by invoking the portal installer with the following parameter specified: -W nodeHost.active=”False”. You should however only do this for test or development installations.

Comparing version numbers in Jython / Python

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Posted on 14 March 2009 No comments

Here comes a function to compare version numbers of e.g. Maven artifacts in Jython / Python.

import re

def cmpver(vA, vB):
    """
    Compares two version number strings
    @param vA: first version string to compare
    @param vB: second version string to compare
    @author Sebastian Thomschke
    @return negative if vA < vB, zero if vA == vB, positive if vA > vB.

    Examples:
    >>> cmpver("0", "1")
    -1
    >>> cmpver("1", "0")
    1
    >>> cmpver("1", "1")
    0
    >>> cmpver("1.0", "1.0")
    0
    >>> cmpver("1.0", "1")
    0
    >>> cmpver("1", "1.0")
    0
    >>> cmpver("1.1.0", "1.0.1")
    1
    >>> cmpver("1.0.1", "1.1.1")
    -1
    >>> cmpver("0.3-SNAPSHOT", "0.3")
    -1
    >>> cmpver("0.3", "0.3-SNAPSHOT")
    1
    >>> cmpver("1.3b", "1.3c")
    -1
    >>> cmpver("1.14b", "1.3c")
    1
    """
    if vA == vB: return 0

    def num(s):
        if s.isdigit(): return int(s)
        return s

    seqA = map(num, re.findall('\d+|\w+', vA.replace('-SNAPSHOT', '')))
    seqB = map(num, re.findall('\d+|\w+', vB.replace('-SNAPSHOT', '')))

    # this is to ensure that 1.0 == 1.0.0 in cmp(..)
    lenA, lenB = len(seqA), len(seqB)
    for i in range(lenA, lenB): seqA += (0,)
    for i in range(lenB, lenA): seqB += (0,)

    rc = cmp(seqA, seqB)

    if rc == 0:
        if vA.endswith('-SNAPSHOT'): return -1
        if vB.endswith('-SNAPSHOT'): return 1
    return rc

Theoretically lines 43 – 49 could be written in a more compact way but using the short circuit evaluations (as below) lead to wrong results – at least in Jython 2.1:

    seqa = map(lambda s: s.isdigit() and int(s) or s, re.findall('\d+|\w+', vA.replace('-SNAPSHOT', '')))
    seqb = map(lambda s: s.isdigit() and int(s) or s, re.findall('\d+|\w+', vB.replace('-SNAPSHOT', '')))

Running TomCat 6 in Debug Mode under Windows

(7 votes)

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Posted on 11 March 2009 1 comment

While tracing some problems in one of my grails applications I had the need to do step debugging on a remote Tomcat server. Eventually I came up with the following lines to launch TomCat in debug mode:

@echo off
set JPDA_TRANSPORT="dt_socket"
set JPDA_ADDRESS="8000"
set JPDA_SUSPEND="y"
catalina.bat jpda start

Simply create a debug.bat file in TomCat’s bin directory and add these lines.

Determine the user who logged on via SSH

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Posted on 23 February 2009 No comments

Today we had the need to determine the initial id of a user who logged onto a Linux box via SSH and executed the su command. When the su command is issued the effective user is changed and whoami or id commands will report that new user id instead.

For anyone who is interested, that is what we came up to put the initial user id into a variable named ${LOGIN_USER}

LOGIN_USER=`who -m`; LOGIN_USER=${LOGIN_USER%% *}

or alternatively

LOGIN_USER=`who -m | cut -d' ' -f1`

Lotus Notes’ [Send only] and [Send and File] buttons for Outlook 2003

(5 votes)

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Posted on 19 February 2009 19 comments

You can say what you want about Lotus Notes, if you have used it for a while and switched e.g. to Outlook, you’ll find yourself missing one or the other nifty Notes function.

Already two of my customers “forced” me to use MS Outlook 2003 and since this isn’t likely to change in the near future, I implemented two of these handy Notes functions for Outlook 2003:

1. The button [Send only] sends e-mails without storing a copy of it in the local mailbox.
2. The button [Send and File...] prompts you for the folder where to store the e-mail being send.

Installation:

1. Download the Visual Basic module in the favored language.
   

     Send Mail Macros for MS Outlook 2003 (EN) (4.9 KiB, 1,750 hits)

     Send Mail Macros for MS Outlook 2003 (DE) (5.1 KiB, 813 hits)

   
   
2. In Outlook open the Visual Basic editor.
   
3. Import the Visual Basic module.
   
4. Save the project.
   
5. Install the buttons in the toolbar.
   
6. When composing a new e-mail the additional buttons should appear in the toolbar.
   
7. When clicking “Send and File…” the folder dialog is displayed before the e-mail is send.
   

getpass for Jython

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Posted on 21 November 2008 1 comment

In my current project I am developing some Jython based command line tools and had the need for masking passwords entered in the command shell. Python provides the getpass module for this purpose. Unfortunately this module has not been made available for Jython.

Here comes a module I wrote to provide this kind of functionality. It uses the mechanism described here http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Security/pwordmask/ to mask characters entered at the command prompt. Additionally if Java 6 or higher is running Jython the module will instead use the new Console.readPassword() method. In case the module is running in an environment where the getpass module is available it will delegate to the corresponding methods of this module instead of using its own implementations.

# ext_getpass.py
# @author Sebastian Thomschke, http://sebthom.de/
import thread, sys, time, os

# exposed methods:
__all__ = ["getpass","getuser"]

def __doMasking(stream):
    __doMasking.stop = 0
    while not __doMasking.stop:
        stream.write("b*")
        stream.flush()
        time.sleep(0.01)

def generic_getpass(prompt="Password: ", stream=None):
    if not stream:
        stream = sys.stderr
    prompt = str(prompt)
    if prompt:
        stream.write(prompt)
        stream.flush()
    thread.start_new_thread(__doMasking, (stream,))
    password = raw_input()
    __doMasking.stop = 1
    return password

def generic_getuser():
    for name in ('LOGNAME', 'USER', 'LNAME', 'USERNAME'):
        usr = os.environ.get(name)
        if usr: return usr

def java6_getpass(prompt="Password: ", stream=None):
    if not stream:
        stream = sys.stderr
    prompt = str(prompt)
    if prompt:
        stream.write(prompt)
        stream.flush()

    from java.lang import System
    console = System.console()
    if console == None:
	    return generic_getpass(prompt, stream)
    else:
        return "".join(console.readPassword())

try:
    # trying to use Python's getpass implementation
    import getpass
    getpass = getpass.getpass
    getuser = getpass.getuser
except ImportError, e:
    getuser = generic_getuser

    # trying to use Java 6's Console.readPassword() implementation
    try:
        from java.io import Console
        getpass = java6_getpass
    except ImportError, e:
        # use the generic getpass implementation
        getpass = generic_getpass

Here is an usage example:

import ext_getpass as getpass

pw = getpass.getpass("Please enter your password:")
print "The entered password was: " + pw