Using UTF-8 in mysql

To use EJBCA-JBoss-MySQL with exotic UTF-8 characters you need to configure MySQL to create the tables with utf-8 character encoding, eotherwise you will get an exception when trying to save a subjectDN for a user.

To use utf8 in mysql you have to set the following options in my.cnf:
default-character-set=utf8
collation-server = utf8_general_ci

BEFORE you start MySQL, create the database and start JBoss.

To check the encoding of the tables:
mysql -u root -p
> use information_schema;
> select table_schema,table_name, table_collation from tables;
| ejbca2 | UserData | utf8_general_ci |
| ejbca2 | UserDataSourceData | utf8_general_ci |
| ejbcatest | AccessRulesData | latin1_swedish_ci |
| ejbcatest | AdminEntityData | latin1_swedish_ci |

Default when installing MySQL in ubuntu is to create with 'table_collation' latin1_swedish_c1', but we want 'utf8_general_ci', which it creates in a database created with the new settings in my.cnf.

Controlling an EJBCA cluster node

Just a little glimpse on what is possible to easily achieve.

Some people have clustered high security environments, where you need multiple people to access a shell or console the EJBCA machine. In such an environment it is convenient if you can do some stuff without logging in...NodeControl is born. Nodecontrol runns in a separate Tomcat instance so is independent of JBoss/EJBCA.
With NodeControl you can:

1. Check HealthCheck on EJBCA
2. Start/stop JBoss
3. Add/remove the node in the cluster by turning on/off the maintenance file in HealthCheck (if maintenance is on, healthcheck returns an error with your message in it)
4. Tail and grep in logfiles from pre-configured directories. Also 'tail -f' a logfile through openssl (or nc) to your machine.

Naturally the NodeControl needs certificate authentication where you drop allowed certificates in a directory. Everything highly configurable of course, and presented in a slick looking ajax gui :)

Some of these functions should probably be available in a future re-make of the EJBCA admin-GUI.

Quick install of Alfresco....

.... with MySQL as database back-end and OpenOffice integration.

Alfresco-and-OpenOffice

EJBCA on Weblogic 9

You do not need the administrative Gui to perform start, stop, deploy or undeploy on Weblogic.
To be able to use the command line you have to enable tunneling (no restart required).

In the gui go to "Environment -> Servers -> myserver(admin) -> Protocols -> Enable Tunneling"

On the command line edit bea/weblogic92/server/bin/config/config.xml and add the following to the <server> section (restart required):

<tunneling-enabled>true</tunneling-enabled>

After this you can use the command line tools. For exampel:

java weblogic.Deployer -user weblogic -password weblogic -name mymodule -undeploy
java weblogic.Deployer -user weblogic -password weblogic -name mymodule -deploy -source /home/jboss/ejbca/dist/ejbca.ear
java weblogic.Deployer -user weblogic -password weblogic -name mymodule -stop
java weblogic.Deployer -user weblogic -password weblogic -name mymodule -start

New page about scripts addons for EJBCA

Scipts for generating lots of users

Made by kinneh and MrsTidy 2007
Tested to generate 20.000 Users, be aware of diskusage (We used about 2GB)

...

http://wiki.ejbca.org/ejbca-scripts

Converting keystores between JKS and P12

Johan dug up these keytool commands, that works with JDK6 and onwards (not in JDK5 and earlier).

JKS → P12
keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.jks -srcstoretype JKS -deststoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore keystore.p12

P12 → JKS
keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.p12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -deststoretype JKS -destkeystore keystore.jks

I recently retested the p12 to jks conversion on Java 7u79, converting a superadmin.p12 keystore from EJBCA to JKS. Still works!

If you need a CA software that can generate both JKS, P12 or PEM keystores directly so you don't have to convert. Take a look at EJBCA Community, or it's supported big brother EJBCA Enterprise.

Using Websphere and WAS under Ubuntu Linux

Some notes about using Websphere ND and RAD under Ubuntu Linux 7.10.

Because Ubuntu uses dash as the default shell (/bin/sh is a link to /bin/dash not /bin/bash) and websphere installation
too requires bash, although it erroneously uses /bin/sh you have two options:

• Change the link /bin/sh to /bin/bash instead of /bin/dash.
• Change /bin/sh to /bin/bash in the websphere shell scripts.

To change to websphere shell scripts you can use the following command, that I found on the web (replace paths to meet you installation):
sudo perl -p -i -e "s/\/sh$/\/bash/" /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/bin/*.sh

To install Rational Applicaton Developer (RAD v7) on a recent Ubuntu you need to
specify some options to java, or your java gui windows will be completely
blank, making it hard to to any installation :-).
To make it work, simply set this environment variable before running
the installer:
export IBM_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.motif.MToolkit