The Developer's Tidbits

Ubuntu’s Message Of The Day or MOTD is the name given to the welcome screen users see when they login to a Ubuntu server using a remote terminal.

In this entry I will guide you to update the standard terminal editor used by Ubuntu from its classic 2009 revision to its latest release.

The other day I was toying around with HTTP2 support and Jetty 9.3 on my Ubuntu Server 14.04 VM install. I had mostly followed the helpful instructions in the Jetty: The Definitive Reference on setting up the application as a web server with support for http, https, deploy modules. But whenever I tried to implement HTTP2 support Jetty would fail with an unhelpful Java error dump. $ java -jar /opt/jetty/start.jar --add-to-startd=http2 org.

In this guide I will walk through the process of hardening HTTPS connectors used by Apache Tomcat. As unfortunately the default configuration of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS using Tomcat 7 and OpenJDK 7 are vulnerable to a number of attacks and weak encryptions.

This entry will guide through the process of creating a self-signed certificate to use on an Apache Tomcat 7 or 8 HTTPS connector. Self-signed certificates allow secure, encrypted HTTPS connections but are not certified by any trusted certificate authority. So first time client connections will receive all kinds of warnings from their web browser. Because of this they are not recommended for use in production environments but are useful for secure LAN traffic or testing HTTPS configurations.

rsync is a widely used tool for synchronisation so to keep copies of a file on multiple computers the same. Because of its flexibility it has become the defacto standard on Linux and other similar systems. While newer protocols and tools such as Dropbox and BitTorrent Sync overlap with and improve on some of rsync’s capability. Rsync is still relevant today both for syncing and for other function such as local directory duplication and large file copying.