I’ll keep this one short. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always been frustrated about how most FTP clients won’t let you search for files on a remote FTP server. I remember I used some client that had this functionality, but this was quite a while ago so I can’t even remember the name of it. If someone else knows any lightweight tools that let you do that, please leave a comment.

I’ve already talked a bit about managing large amounts of files in my post Disk efficiency when dealing with tons of small files so you can kind of tell that I’m a proponent of having as little files on disk as possible (but not less). In my everyday tasks I’m using this program called Everything by David Carpenter and I suggest you check it out if you don’t know it yet.

Imagine a situation where you’re sitting in front of a colleague’s computer or one that is publicly used. By definition you’re missing all your favorite tools that you’re used to and you can’t install them even if you wanted to. Here’s a short list of online tools that help me a lot when I’m using a computer other than my own. These do not fully replace the desktop equivalents, but they’re good enough.

Recently I’ve been watching quite a few screencasts which seem to be a really fun way to learn something. This made me want to create something of my own. So for this blog post I’m putting up my first attempts at creating screencasts while trying to explain something useful. When dealing with PKI based application security, one usually encounters different systems on different platforms and making sure they can interact with each other can be quite a hassle.

Recently I watched this webinar about Tomcat 7 presented by Mark Thomas and would like to share my thoughts on the subject and what I’ve learned. Servlet 3.0 The most prominent change is the support of Servlet 3.0 specification which supports such great features as asynchronous servlets – not used by default web-fragment.xml – you can specify parts of the configuration in your libraries which you plan to reuse The effective deployment descriptor (web.

This one is for the security conscious. If you are performing a hardening procedure for your OS, application/web server, other applications you might wonder how are other people doing that and where can you draw the line by saying that it is secure-enough. A great place of resource in such a case is the CIS Security specifically their resources download page. There you’ll find a form that allows you to choose and download a whole bunch of security benchmarks for various products like Apache HTTP server, Tomcat, Apple OSX, FreeBSD, Windows OSes, Firefox, MySQL, Oracle and various others.

I want to share with you yet another tool this one will help you with the architecture development. The tool is called Structure 101 and you can download a trial version here. That’s right, this tool is not free, but it does it’s job really well and at the time I can’t think of a free alternative that would be just as good. If you do know any good alternative, please, do leave a comment.

Another day – another lesson learned. Today I tried to optimize Apache HTTP server configuration in a sense to write less configuration to achieve the same result. Of course I messed up the first few times since I’m not really an admin and don’t have that much experience doing that. Typically relying on short configuration samples and snippets does the trick, but it’s not always the best way to do things.

Over time I used quite an arsenal of various small utilities and tools for Windows that do some specific task. Some of them are outdated, no longer maintained, others I simply forgot because they were rarely used. One tool that I’ve been using for a while now is Process Explorer by Mark Russinovich who created many great tools to the Windows platform. If you don’t know this tool it’s a replacement for the Task Manager with many great features for monitoring processes, file handles, etc.

If you’re using Google Chrome browser from the so-called developer channel (i.e. beta version) now you can enjoy the improved PDF support. The thing is that with all the buzz around the PDF format (in)security a lot of companies seem to have taken some steps in providing a more secure user experience for PDF viewing. Since most of the attacks using PDF files are targeted towards the Adobe Reader we’ve seen a lot of updates for the viewer this year.

I decided to write down a short introduction to Xming. For those not in the know Xming is an implementation of the X Window System for Microsoft Windows operating systems. This means that you can install this software on Windows, run a remote linux program that requires a graphical interface and see the result on your local computer. Visit the Xming home page and see the screenshots if it seems difficult to wrap your mind around the concept.

This is yet another post on Apache httpd server installation and configuration. I say another because I’ve already written about how to install the packaged version of Apache for two specific linux distros. This time I’ll quickly jot down how I configured and compiled Apache for my needs. There are a few reasons to do this. One of the more important ones being to have a newer version of Apache. It seems that prepackaged Apache versions for some linux distributions can be quite out of date.