Setup of Static IP addresses on Ubuntu

In these examples, I have used the OpenDNS servers, please change as appropriate.


sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

Example contents:

auto l0 eth0
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.1.10.xxx
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.1.10.0
broadcast 10.1.10.255
gateway 10.1.10.1
dns-nameservers 208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
dns-search home


sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf

NOTE: I’m not 100% sure if this is required!
Add appropriate content, example:

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
search home

sudo restart networking
ifconfig
sudo ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0
sudo restart

REFERENCES:

Custom 404 Page for Tomcat web applications

This is a relatively common problem in JSP based apps as you need to understand the configuration. It’s further complicated if you use Apache HTTPD in front of the Apache Tomcat server to process requests as you need to know where each request is processed.

For this example, we will use the standard 404 error, but you can also intercept other errors for custom pages.

  1. create 404.jsp:

    <% final SimpleDateFormat simpleDate = new SimpleDateFormat("EE MMM dd yyyy hh:mm:ss aa zzz");
    final String dttm = simpleDate.format(new Date()); %>
    <html>
    <title>404 Not Found</title>
    <ul>
    <li>Time: <%= dttm %></li>
    <li>User-Agent: <%= request.getHeader("User-Agent") %></li>
    <li>Server: <%= request.getServerName() %></li>
    <li>Request: <%= request.getRequestURI() %></li>
    <li>Remote: <%= request.getRemoteAddr() %></li>
    <li>Referer: <%= request.getHeader("Referer") %></li>
    </ul>
    </html>
  2. in WEB-INF/web.xml – add the following (NOTE: location within the file is important but outside the scope of this post)

    <error-page>
    <error-code>404</error-code>
    <location>/404.jsp</location>
    </error-page>
  3. You might want to force the HTTP Header to give something other than a ‘404 status’ code, otherwise MSIE will show an unstyled ‘friendly error message’ if the user has not turned off the default setting. Unfortunately, this also means that search engines might index these pages that should not exist.

REF:

Enable HTTP GZip compression on Apache Tomcat

This one escaped me for a long time and I never saw a decent example of it in any of the documentation.

GZip compression saves on network bandwidth as files are compressed during transport between the HTTP Server and browser/client. If you already use Apache HTTP or a similar webserver to front Tomcat, this is not always necessary, but in cases where you expose your appserver directly, even if it is just for testing, you may want to add this configuration item as it increases the perceived speed of the application.

The solution is simple:

  1. To be safe, first stop the server and backup your configuration files
  2. Look in the /TOMCAT/conf installation folder.
  3. In the ‘server.xml’ file, you will find a line resembling…
    <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" />
  4. This one controls the HTTP/1.1 connections, add a new value to the list…
    compression="on"
  5. NOTE You might also see a value for for AJP/1.3, unfortunately compression only works for HTTP:
    <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />
  6. Restart your server.

Cheers

Mozilla networking configuration

Here’s another, albeit awkward configuration change for Mozilla Firefox for networking.

Enter about:config in the URL of the browser and manipulate the following,  I’ve shown the defaults in parethesis to aid in reverting them if you encounter problems.

network.http.pipelining=true (def:false)
network.http.proxy.pipelining (def:false – only required if you use proxies that support)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=8 (def:4, max is 8)

References:

Cheers!

Proxy Auto-config

There comes a need for many organizations (or individuals) to establish proxy servers on their network. This is usually done for reasons of security or network topology. While the use of proxy servers simpifies some aspects of networking, it comes at the cost of maintaining the browser configuration of every network device (usually browsers). Netscape provided a mechanism to automate much of this problem by allowing the browser to retrieve the proxy configuration from a centrally managed server.

The proxy autoconfig file is written in JavaScript, it should be a separate file that has the proper filename extension and MIME type when provided from a webserver.

The file must define the function:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
...
}

1. FILENAME EXTENSION:
.pac

2. MIME TYPE:
application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig

3. REFERENCES:

4. ApacheHTTP config.

Add the following to the httpd.conf file:

Redirect permanent /wpad.dat {yourdomain}/proxy.pac
AddType application/x-ns-proxy-autoconfig .pac

5. EXAMPLE:

/* 'proxy.pac' - This is the main function called by any browser */
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{

if (isPlainHostName(host) || // No Proxy for Non FQDN names
shExpMatch(host, “*.localnet”) || // No Proxy for internal network
shExpMatch(host, “127.0.0.1”) || // No Proxy for LocalHost
shExpMatch(host, “localhost”) || // No Proxy for LocalHost
shExpMatch(host, “mailhost”) || // No Proxy for MailHost
dnsDomainIs(host, “giantgeek.com”) || // No Proxy
return “DIRECT”;

else {
return “PROXY proxy.giantgeek.com:8080; PROXY proxy.giantgeek.com:8090; PROXY proxy2.giantgeek.com:8080”;

} //End else

} // End function FindProxyForUrl

NOTE: Also see my ‘WPAD’ blog entry.