Setting default SSH shell to bash

I spent some times to figure out how to execute a remote command using “bash” and thought of sharing my findings (make your job easier).

An easy way is to go and edit ~/.profile and add the bash over there.

However above will not work if you try to remotely execute a script file, to solve that issues you need to edit

/etc/passwd

Find the entry corresponding to your logging and edit the last part of the entry for example; if the entry is like;

abc:x:13:13:abc:/bin:/bin/sh
then change that to
abc:x:13:13:abc:/bin:/bin/bash

You are in the business now…

How to disable service listing in Axis2

Number of users have requested to have a way to enable/disable service listing in Axis2. What that means is, by default Axis2 list out all the service in the system when you go the following URL;

http://localhost:8080/axis2/services/listServices

However there are situation where we do not need to expose our services publicly, in such a situation following would comes handy.

To enable/disable service listing use following parameter in axis2.xml (WEB-INF/con/axis2.xml).

<parameter name="disableServiceList">true</parameter>

True – Disable
False -Enable

Adding this does not prevent listing service under administration window, to stop it, you need to change the default username and password. You can do that by changing the following two paramters.

<parameter name="userName">admin</parameter>
<parameter name="password">axis2</parameter>

You can download the fix here, replace axis2-kernel.jar (WEB-INF/lib) with this.

ApacheCon Asia 2009

ApacheCon is one of the main even ASF organizes each year, usually there are two main Apachecon, one in USA and on in EU. In 2006 we extend ApacheCon in to Asia and had the very first ApacheCon Asia in Colombo, Sri Lanka. And believe that was one of the very successful ApacheCon, even with security situation in country we were able to get a number of national and international speakers. Finally it was a great event....

After 3 years, Sri Lanka FOSS community organizing the second ApacheCon Asia both in Colombo, Sri Lanka and Beijing, China. I hope this time it will be much more better than 2006, unfortunately I am going to miss it....

Other than USA and few Europe countries, Sri Lanka has a large number of Apache Committers and Contributors (over 60 committers), so this would be a good chance for them to get together and meet other apache folks.

Google Open Source Blog: Tasty New Google Summer of Code Stats

Google Open Source Blog: Tasty New Google Summer of Code Stats

University of Moratuwa became the number one in Google Summer of Code

It is so nice to hear that University of Moratuwa has became the number one in the Google summer code for the second consecutive year. Congratulation !!!

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/tasty-new-google-summer-of-code-stats.html

I strongly believe Dr Sanjiva is the one who started this trend, and helped all of us to contribute to the world of open source and gain most benefits from it. And the small island (my Sri Lanak) has became the top contributor to the open source. Thank you for guiding us and helping us.

Happy birthday Axis2 !!!

Five years ago, that is in 21 August 2004, we started Apache Axis2 project. Withing this small period Axis2 has become the most commonly used open source Web Service framework. And number of companies out there using Axis2 for their SOA applications. Withing this small period Axis2 has opened a number of opportunities, which includes new companies, various graduate opportunities and ect..

Why 21 st of August is important ? Well that is because that is the date we had the first face2face meeting on Axis2.

Let's look back some of the history of Axis2 project.

This is the First email that Srinath sent to the list announcing Axis2 F2F

These are the first set of people who come to the Axis2 F2F.

This is the summary mail of the first F2F

Initial developers of the project
Srinath, Ajith, Chinthaka, Chathura, Glen, Dims, Sanjiva and myself. And of course Jaliya and Dasarath also contributed a lot.


At the initial stage of Axis2 we used to have weekly chat, what special about those chat is we(initial developers) implement a prototype and discuss about that at the weekly chat. The funny thing is all most all the days, we have to throw that prototype and start a new one after the chat.
Here is the chat log of the first weekly chat.


From the day one of the project we used to follow the Apache guidelines, so we create patch and send them to the list. Then existing commiters can apply them, most of the time Alex and Dims used to apply those patches.

Here is the very first patch of the project.


When we start the project we did not have any commiter for Axis2 project, we had WS commiters. So following are the initial commiters of Axis2 project and here is the commiiter nomination email.

[VOTE][Axis2]Ajith, Deepal and Chinthaka for Axis2 Commiter


At the initial stage of the project we had so many milestone release before we hit 0.94 release. Here is the announcement email for first release of Axis2.
Axis2 first release – Axis2 M1


First few F2F

• First F2F 21-24 August 2004, Colombo, Sri Lanka. And here is the first set of people who came to the event
• Second F2F March 29-31st 2005 – Comobo, Sri Lanka
• Third F2F and hackathon – December, 2005, San Diago, USA
• Fourth F2F and hackathon - Indiana University, Bloomington
  

And here is my first email to Axis2 mailing list

My first mail to the list

Amazon EC2 and instances failures

I really like Amazon EC2 and I use that for different kind of experiments. Most of the time I use small, large and high cpu extra large instances. Most of the time my experiments run for about 10~15 hours, so far so good. I like Amazon I can easily scale out my experiments, I can easily increase the number of instances, if the instances is not enough to handle my application then I can move to different instance type etc...

However I am experiencing some issues, first issues is when I start about 10~15 instances most of them start quickly and few take a long time to start, because of that I have to wait (and pay additional $$ to amazon) to start my experiments. Even after I start my experiment, some times some of the instances become un-reachable, thats the killer. When that happen I have no option other than rebooting (or waiting a long time..) the instance(s) and restart the experiment. So my 15 hours experiment end up running for 25~30 hours. Issues is I have to pay $$ ...

I believe this is something Amazon has to address, EC2 idea is cool, but due to some network and infrastructure issues we can not use the EC2 as we expected.

Sometime this instance failure last only for few minutes and come back fine, sometime we really need to reboot or terminate the instances.

Who is master in Math and why?

One of my colleague explained me a very nice story he learned by reading the book called “Outliers”. According that book, it says Asian are some what smarter when it come to mathematics. And there is a nice story behind that too, that is the number system they used. For example in English we start with, one, two three.... , ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and etc... , if you think carefully. In English language though you pronounce as thirteen fourteen you write them differently. As en example when we call thirteen, it gave impression that the number is going to start with three, in fact it does not.

So, according the book this complexity make some issues in the childhood.

After listening to my friend I thought though this, then I found even in my own language (Sinhalese) we have some confusion. For example in Sinhalese when it come to 15 we pronounce is differently than other numbers, simply we break the sequence. From eleven to twenty we have a right sequence, the way we write and read is same except number 15.