OpenSSL vulnerability – Heartbleed Bug statement
You might think the Heartbleed bug is already history, but in recent days some of our customers have requested a public announcement due to the unprecedented media profile of this particular security vulnerability.
Whilst the media are (rightly, to an extent) making a lot of noise about this bug and its significance to the Internet population at large, the truth is we as sysadmins haven’t treated this security threat any differently to any other.
There are lots of important security vulnerabilities uncovered which have the potential to give an attacker full access to your server (arguably more serious than this case) – so we patch and workaround security vulnerabilities on an almost daily basis as part of our fully managed service. There is simply no reason or benefit to announce each and every one of these – our customers use our service to stay focused on their business rather than technical details like these.
Our expert technical team are always there in the background, performing server tune-ups to ensure that the configuration is optimal and secure at all times, so that you don’t have to.
If you somehow managed to miss the media coverage and the myriad of announcements and emails in your inbox about the Heartbleed bug, you can find more details regarding this vulnerability alert issued by the OpenSSL group on April 7, 2014: http://heartbleed.com/
Generating Jelastic SSH keys with PuTTYgen
We’ve just added key-based SSH access to our Jelastic PaaS, and with many of our Windows users using PuTTY as their preferred SSH client it seems a good moment to give a brief PuTTYgen walkthrough. Here’s how to generate SSH keys using PuTTY.
1. Download and open puttygen.exe (included with putty-version-installer.exe, or standalone)
2. Enter the following parameters (the defaults are fine):
New: Jelastic SSH Access
Ever wanted to combine the awesome power of our Jelastic PaaS with command line utilities of the latest generation PHP frameworks, Composer package management, or just enjoy the simple elegance of vim for some on-the-fly last minute edits?
Guess what – now you can! We’ve added an SSH gateway to our platform so now you can log in to any of your Jelastic nodes and configure key based authentication for your git repos, run artisan, and validate your httpd.conf before restarting apache!
How to Tune the Garbage Collector in Tomcat
The guys at PayPal recently switched away from Java, citing (perhaps false/questionable ?) performance gains. One important, but easily overlooked, way to keep your Java app performing at its best is to make sure that the JVM is well tuned to your needs – that includes taming the Garbage Collector.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
– Robert Sewell
Java’s Garbage Collector does an important job, and if you tune it properly, you can prevent memory intensive programs from freezing your system. It’s easy to assume that if you know how to develop large programs and applications, you probably already know how the Garbage Collection process works. Ergo if you choose the right Garbage Collector algorithm, it means you totally understand the features of the program you have developed.
If you’re not quite sure how the whole process works, we’ll try to summarise the most important aspects for you.
Meet the Garbage Collector, it will save your day!
You’ve just developed a large application, and you couldn’t be more excited! But, as this application runs, it creates objects; as it continues to run, many of these objects are no longer required and they cause your program to run out of memory for no apparent reason.
Hosting the Christmas Holiday @Layershift
The Christmas holiday season is already kicking into gear, with people travelling across country, and even around the world, to spend precious time with their loved ones. For many, hosting servers and services are already far from their minds – but of course when you open up that website to spend a Christmas gift voucher, or play that new online game, you still expect it to work flawlessly.
Layershift Christmas opening times
Just like you, we try to give our hard working teams a nice relaxing Christmas so that they can spend quality time with their families and loved ones.
We all know that the internet never sleeps, and certainly server problems are not so kind as to respect any holiday season – so be assured that even though we will be running with a skeleton staff (to give our team as much of a well deserved break as possible) over the Christmas period, we remain ready to handle any issue and provide assistance 24×7: even on Christmas Day itself.