Today I upgraded Java from 1.6 to 1.7 on a CentOS (RHEL) 6 Linux server, and ran into a small issue. Typically when I install java on linux I use the RPM packages, this allows you to run multiple versions of Java incase you need to roll back to a prior version.

Running ColdFusion 10 on Linux you might run into an issue when checking the server status, if your ColdFusion user account has a default shell of /sbin/nologin (this is how your account should be setup for security purposes). So for example when you run:

/etc/init.

Did you ever wonder how much bandwidth your linux server is using each month, or each day? There are a number of tools that can give you this information, but many of them are packet sniffers, and can effect performance.

Do you have access to a shell account on a unix server with some spare space? If so it's pretty easy to incrementally backup your files securely with SSH.

SANS has published a list of the top 20 internet security vulnerabilities of 2005. The list is not however cumulative, it features security vulnerabilities that have been the most prevalent within the past year and a half.

Learning UNIX is a seemingly daunting task, there are thousands of commands out there, each with hundreds of options. But in reality you only need to know a few of them.

I use unix quite a bit, usually either on one of our Linux servers, or on my Powerbook with OS X.

I just upgraded to BlueDragon 6.2 on our secondary web server, it was previously running BlueDragon 6.1. The process was pretty smooth, I was worried about having the server down for an hour while I upgraded, but it turned out that I only had a few minutes of down time.

I was just looking at the Linux system requirements for ColdFusion MX 7. For supported linux operating systems, it lists:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS & ES 2.1 or 3.0

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x

TurboLinux 8 Server (Japanese only)

In 6.

I found this site with a handy list of OS X and Linux shell commands, along with documentation.

This blog entry shows the steps used to compile and build apache2 on linux. The example uses Apache 2.0.46 on Redhat 8 using a bash shell, you will need gcc installed. You can find Apache's install instructions here

Downlaod the latest tar.gz file for apache2

Here are the settings that bluedragon 6.1 adds to your httpd.conf file. I am posting these because it is helpful when your trying to install on an unsupported platform.

ServletExecInstances default 127.0.0.1:9999

ServletExecAliases default /servlet servlet .jsp .cfc .cfm .

I read part of Real World Linux Security this weekend. It's a very detailed book that covers a wide range of security topics, from an author with lots of security experience.