A Bot from Brussel?!

I can see in Google Analytics a bunch of new visits every day to our service, buzzbox.com, from Brussel, Belgium.
They don't look right. It seems to be a Bot that is somehow downloading all static files and executing the google analytics script too.

All the visits come from 2 IP addresses

84.17.129.60
84.17.129.61

And the User Agent, as it appears in my access log, is

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; c) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/528.5+) WebShot"

We get most of our traffic from Twitter, so I think it is something connected with Bit.ly

I'm currently blocking requests from those IPs... but it would be nice to understand more. Anybody has any clue? Please leave a comment.

Tomcat on EC2 hot deployment

I'm running a simple application on Amazon EC2 on a single Tomcat and I have been looking for a while for the best way to deploy updates.

I'm builing the application with Maven 2 and so I first I considered using the Cargo plugin to connect with a running Tomcat Manager. It didn't work for me: the Tomcat Manager stops and undeploys the application before starting receiving the new war file. In my case I was waiting almost 2 minutes to see my new war up and running (2 minutes in which the application is not reachable). I considered that too long.

I ended up uploading the application with scp and then moving it in place in the running Tomcat.

1. Create this script on the server. hotdeploy.sh

#!/bin/sh
TOMCATWEBAPPS=/var/local/tomcat-buzzbox/webapps
chown tomcat:tomcat ROOT.war

if [ -f $TOMCATWEBAPPS/ROOT.war ]; then
  cp -p $TOMCATWEBAPPS/ROOT.war ROOT.war.previous
fi

cp -p ROOT.war $TOMCATWEBAPPS/ROOT.war

It just move the war file in tomcat/webapps, while tomcat is running

2. Make sure your Tomcat is configured for auto deploy (in server.xml)

<Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
       unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
       xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">

3. Create this script on your local machine (or development environment). deploy.bat - I'm using windows and cygwin.

echo off
echo Overwrite App with new version. Are you sure?
echo -- press any key to continue; CNTR+C to cancel

pause

scp -i keypair1.pem ROOT.war root@domain.com:/root/ROOT.war
ssh -i keypair1.pem root@domain.com 'cd /root/bb-deploy; ./hotdeploy.sh'

That is: scp to move your war file and ssh to run the hostdeploy.sh script on the server. Tomcat auto deploys does the rest.

That's all. It works great for me. Only few seconds of downtime.
What do you think? How would you deploy a war in such an environment?

Virtual Hosts with Apache, Tomcat, AJP

Here I describe how to configure Apache to handle request for 2 virtual hosts, redirecting the requests to 2 Tomcat installed on the same machine.

Suppose you want to handle 2 applications hello.com and welcome.com.
The DNS points to the same IP address and Apache is listening to port 80.


Apache/2.2.3

Add proxy_ajp.conf in /etc/httpd/conf.d

LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
       ServerName hello.com
       DocumentRoot /var/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/
       ProxyPass /static/ !
       ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8091/
       ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:8091/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
       ServerName welcome.com
       DocumentRoot /var/local/tomcat2/webapps/ROOT/
       ProxyPass /static/ !
       ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:8090/
       ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:8090/
</VirtualHost>

Note how the static files (tipically images, css, javascripts... everything inside /static/) will be served by Apache. You need to have both "ProxyPass /static/ !" and the correct DocumentRoot.

Tomcat 6.0.18

The default configuration of Tomcat 6.0.18 works pretty fine. You just have to change the ports so they don't conflict. I'm using 8090 and 8091 for the 2 APJ Connectors of the 2 Tomcats.

Amazon EC2 - file transfert console

If you run Windows, and you want something more user friendly to move file from and to EC2 than "scp", you can use WinSCP, following this directions:

1. Download WinSCP
2. Download puttygen
3. convert your private key (keypair1.pem) to putty format using puttygen. Save it as .ppk

Just run:
puttygen.exe keypair1.pem
then meny File/Save as Private Key

4. connect to your instance using WinSCP, specifing scp protocol and using the generated ppk key

A Blog Style for posting code

It took me a while to configure the style of this blog as I wanted.
I needed a template that was clean, easy to read, and wide enough to post code.
I needed a simple way to format code, mostly Java or XML. I wanted to use free tools and I wanted to copy and paste the code from my IDE without touching it (no adding spaces or tabs, please).

So, I came up with this solution:

1. Select "Minima Lefty Stretch by Douglas Bowman". Then you have to modify the template... read on.

2. Make it 960px width and with a dark bg color.

<Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"
             type="color" default="#fff" value="#162541">

#outer-wrapper {
width:960px;
margin:auto;
background:#ffffff;
padding:10px;
text-align:left;
font: normal normal 100% Verdana, sans-serif;
}

3. fix the publication date line and the body line-height

<style>
.postmeta {
  font-size:80%;
  text-align:right;
}

.post-body{
 // line-height: 1.6em ---- make sure you remove this
}

4. Add code formatting support with csharpformat

<style>
.postmeta {
  font-size:80%;
  text-align:right;
}
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
    font-size: small;
    color: black;
    font-family: Consolas, &quot;Courier New&quot;, Courier, Monospace;
    background-color: rgb(240, 250, 230);
    /*white-space: pre;*/
        overflow: auto; overflow-y: visible;
        padding: 10px;
        border: solid 1px rgb(120, 125, 115);
}

.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; overflow: auto; overflow-y: visible;}
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt 
{
    background-color: #f4f4f4;
    width: 100%;
    margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

</style>

5. To format my code, I copy and paste my code to csharpformat (it works decently for Java too) and then I paste the result in blogger's HTML view.