Fusion Newsletter, March 2010

Payment Card Industry – Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) and HTTPS SSL/TLS Connections

If you want to secure any data sent over HTTPS you need to make sure the protocols and ciphers used are secure. In practice, this means disabling SSLv2 and weak ciphers. This has to be done at the SSL endpoint – so if you’re using a load balancer, firewall or similar to terminate your SSL connections you’ll need to make the changes there.

New system configuration – It’s not just the application server!

Every application is different, there’s no golden rules but there are some simple steps you can take to improve performance, security & stability. For a typical web & application server machine let’s look at an example Linux setup.

Killing Rogue Requests – Going native, don’t stop me now!

FusionReactor is a great monitoring tool and one of my favorite features is the ability to kill rogue requests. FusionReactor is sometimes limited by Java itself. Java has a known limitation that threads running “Native Code” can’t be killed (until the thread returns from the native code block).

JVM PermGen memory usage with many CFM templates

There are several causes for filling the PermGen space but one common one is too many templates for the allotted space.

FusionReactor Crash Protection – Regular Expressions “How To”

FusionReactor has a nifty Crash Protection feature allowing it to abort requests that take too long. This works in a similar way to the ColdFusion server page timeouts but at a lower level allowing FusionReactor to stop requests under many more circumstances.