Hi Everyone. We’re currently the target of a broad-based dictionary attack from Bots in Hong Kong and the United States, trying to crack our administrator account, as evidenced in our log files. Fortunately, our defence measures are holding and we are monitoring the situation closely. If you encounter any issues on our website, please let us know.
The ISP administrators at the source of these attacks have disabled their own support/abuse emails, so there is no way to stop them at the source. Whether or not this is deliberate is subject of speculation.
I don’t normally cross-post, but this article is really a good bit of wisdom from my colleagues at the World Conference for Disaster Management, where I spoke a few years ago. The article is definitely worth the read, so I am recommending it.
This applies to large companies, governments, emergency managers, as well as a number of our clients who need the responsiveness and resiliency of being Indestructible. Please, if you read nothing else this week, read this article.
We’ve had a few plug-ins on our test site and they seem to be working out. I’m planning on rolling these into our main site this weekend and monitoring for issues. If you see anything, please report them here or through the contact page.
This one was rather annoying, so I thought I’d share lessons learned. Yesterday morning, our web host provider had a number of servers accidentally added to BlackList 1. Not good, because it caused our outgoing email under the .com TLD to be blocked. This meant that all outgoing emails bounced. Fortunately, our backup .ca TLD domain is hosted elsewhere. We’ve switched over temporarily, and while annoying, it does show that unless a company has a backup for email, they can be shut down rapidly and with no notice. We are still waiting for resolution.
Relating to our Anti-Spam policy, users who register using automatic means, or who appear to be fake in the judgment of our site administrators may be removed without notice. If you have problems with access and are a legitimate user, please contact us and we will manually create a user for you. Note that we will not automatically remove posts without first reviewing these based on our website terms of use policy.
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The contents of this website are property of Nexbridge Inc. When you post comments or pages to this website, the content becomes property of Nexbridge Inc.
You will not post any material that have ownership limitations that prevent these above policies from being in force.
You have the legal right and authorization to post any and all material you post on this site.
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Spam is 100% unacceptable and in violation of CASL legislation in Canada. We have a zero tolerance for it. If we find that you are involved in spamming practices in any manner, we will remove your user and access with no notice.
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We reserve the right to block your IP address, subnet, and/or domain as we see fit, with or without evidence, based entirely at our discretion. Any attempts at misusing our website may result in the removal of your user id and/or access without notice at any time.
Our client is an international corporation who has a mature and well adopted financial switch in the UNIX/Oracle space. They have over one hundred financial customers.
The Client’s Challenge
As Indestructibility and Continuous Availability requirements become more desirable, our client wanted to port their code to the HP NonStop™ platform. Their challenge was to have their system perform better than it has on other platforms. We were engaged to make recommendations on how to improve the code and to augment their porting effort.
Our Mandate
As part of achieving our client’s objectives, we were given the mandate to fine-tune their code, practices, SQL structures, and application management framework. Also, we were engaged to make recommendations on design changes for porting code to the NonStop architecture.
The Key Benefits Our Client Received
In order to help our customer, Nexbridge contributed in the following ways:
Using our indestructible architecture constructs, we helped move their code to the NonStop TS/MP environment, with online code update capabilities.
Migrated to SQL/MX 3.2.1 to support large tables and higher performance.
Reduced the number of system transactions to match actual business transactions, thereby reducing transaction times and massively increasing capacity.
Leveraging new technology available in the IP CLIM, we build the ability to preserve socket connections across failures.
Revised their code to function at an unprecedented business transaction rate.
Acted as guides for their technology plans.
Conducted a benchmark to demonstrate the new speed and capabilities of their application and to enable the publication of their results.
End Conditions
Once our services were completed, the client had the fastest, reliable, hot-upgrade capable, and most cost effective financial switch available with over 6000 TPS performance levels. Their success is documented on the BPC Banking Technologies website. We are honoured to have played a part in this historic and ground-breaking project. We are also honoured to continue our association with this client.
For more information, about this and our other successes, please contact us.
Ok, I know. Why am I bothering to tell anyone? We’ve got WordPress 3.8.1. in UAT (that’s User Acceptance Testing, in case you don’t know – and you should know). It is scheduled to go live over the weekend when no one is looking. If you see any problems, please let me know.
I am so pleased to have just done an Indestructibility Assessment for the Richmond Hill Chamber of Commerce, who passed with flying colours. It is actually rare that organizations are so well prepared. Some of the things they did right:
Weathered the recent Ice Storm very nicely. Their operations barely noticed it.
Have sound backup plans for loss of technical and human resources.
Replace their UPS batteries on a regular basis.
Manage their systems very nicely.
Understand and follow their data retention requirements.
Plus lots more…
As a member of the Chamber, I am very happy that we are so well represented and glad to be associated with them.
Well, we hoped this one would go away, but even with the latest (JDK 1.7.0_51 as of today), the problem we saw with Indigo and Java 1.7 still exists. This problem results from the way Oracle modified Array.sort() in a threading environment. Unfortunately, as of the day I posted this, the NSDEE 4.0 installation instructions did not include a discussion of how to deal with this problem. You will find a discussion of what the ECLIPSE contributors have done relating to this problem here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=317785.
For ECLIPSE 3.6.x to 4.2.2 modify the config.ini file found in the ECLIPSE configuration directory (eclipse/configuration/config.ini) and add the following parameter:
-Djava.util.Arrays.useLegacyMergeSort=true
Run ECLIPSE 3.6.x to 4.2.2 using the Java 6 JRE/JDK.
Revisions 6_20 upward are acceptable to ECLIPSE. You can still build
with the Java 7 JDK by configuring your compilers internally to
ECLIPSE through Window/Preference.
This is of particular importance to NSDEE 2.x, NSDEE 3.x, and NSDEE 4.x users that have a large number of dependencies to ECLIPSE CDT components installed in a combination of remote update sites and local archives.
The problem has been either not been resolved for ECLIPSE 3.7.1 and above or was reintroduced. See the Indigo post for the original support note.