Monthly Archives: March 2006

Compiling Ruby on IBM AIX

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Continuing my adventure on IBM AIX v5.3 ML2 with Core Dumps, this time it was Ruby!!! My simple Ruby program would give a core dump when I tried to include ‘drb’ module in my ruby script. I was running Ruby v1.8.2.

I got some clues from some news groups that there was some problem in Ruby on AIX in the sockets area and its something to do with IPV6. I was told that if I compile Ruby by disabling ipv6, I should be ok!

Guess what! I ventured into my first experience of compiling Ruby from the Source. And wow! my problem went away and no Core Dumps 🙂

I thought I should put down the steps I went thru in compiling Ruby on AIX.
1. Download latest Ruby Source from ruby-lang.org. The latest version at this point is v1.8.4.
2. Unzip the source tar file into a specific directory.
3. Invoke configure with a parameter –disable-ipv6
4. Invoke make ruby.imp
5. Invoke make
6. Invoke make install

That’s it! You have done it!

Core Dump running Weblogic on IBM AIX? – Dont Panic!!!

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I must say, I am quite fortunate to have got some good opportunity to try and run our j2ee application on IBM AIX OS.

I deployed the application and started the application. All went well until I hit upon the very famous “Core Dump – Dump Handler is Processing Signal 11”. I had to spend almost 2 to 3 hours weaving thru lots of newsgroups on the internet and figured out that the FileDescriptor Upper Limit was not set(which means its set to unlimited) there is a problem in AIX in performing a malloc() to obtain a memory segment.

This is what I learnt

This is due to an AIX issue when WLS attempts to perform a malloc() to obtain a memory segment. The WLS Posix Socket Muxer code (NativeIO and stuff) does a malloc based on the FDLimit. If it’s unlimited, AIX 4 and 5 tend to throw a malloc exception. WebLogic Server WLS made it 1025, which the user can set higher if desired.

Check out this URL for more details…

Yet another SSL Sniffing Tool

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Sometime back I had blogged about ClearWatch which is a very handy SSL sniffing tool. Here, you require the Private Key of the Server for decrypting the HTTPS packets.

However often, I end up in situations having to sniff the SSL traffic of Production Systems, where I donot have access to the Private Key.

Now, I have come across another excellent tool called BurpSuite. This tool can do more in the sense that, it can sniff SSL Packets without having to provide the Private Key of the Server. Also, it allows to intercept requests/responses with specific header information and allows us to change the header data whenever required. This tool basically is a special proxy server. One has to configure the browser to go thru this proxy server for sniffing purposes.

Check it out!