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I’ve just got back from the fourth straight (long) day down at the colo and this is about all my brain can handle at the moment:

Tomcat has quite a good page in its documentation about getting SSL working and it does a reasonable job describing how to generate a self-signed cert. However, when it comes to what must be a fairly common use case of importing an existing key/certificate pair into a keystore it avoids the subject with phrases like: “For more advanced cases, consult the OpenSSL documententation.”

The problem is really java’s keytool. It does a good job generating self-signed certs, importing existing certificates you want to trust or importing a certificate received from a CSR generated by keytool. But when it comes to importing both the certificate and key into a keystore things get a little messier. For example, say you already have a certificate you are using on your apache web server and you now want to use it in your Tomcat server. You might think you can do something like:

keytool -import -alias tomcat -keystore <your_keystore_filename> -file <your_certificate_filename>


but that just won’t work. It turns out the only way to import an existing key/certificate pair is to do it programatically. Get the details on my wiki.

Oh, another thing to watch out for is to make sure you always use the genuine Sun Java keytool. The thing that comes with gcj and is probably first in your $PATH will only make you cry.

While I was doing a yum update today I noticed it was trying mirror.facebook.com. It turns out they mirror a lot of open source projects there.

They also have a public svn repository where you can grab the source code of Thrift which looks interesting.

I just watched Napoleon Dynamite. I was expecting the usual crappy teen movie (a genre I kind of like anyway) but it turned out to be a genuinely entertaining film.

The film has a plot so thin it’s barely there but the real interest is in the characters. The eponymous Napoleon Dynamite, played by Jon Heder, is a study in supreme nerdiness. In fact most of the main characters are painfully awkward.

It seems to have got mixed reviews but if you like quirky humour and you were even slightly nerdy in school I recommend giving it a go.
It also has a great soundtrack. Here’s a sample courtesy of Seeqpod: