Tomcat 5.0 and jmx.jar in Eclipse

I used to use the sysdeo Tomcat plugin in Eclipse for my development, but someone suggested that I take a look at the Eclipse Web Tools project, which is an application server feature for Eclipse. It seems like it is the mechanism through which Eclipse is planning to support application servers in the future, so I thought it would be worth a look.

However, once I got it installed, I ran into a problem that is mentioned a few times on various sites on the web, but with few solutions. When I tried to run the application server, I got the following message:

Due to new licensing guidelines mandated by the Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors, a JMX implementation can no longer be distributed with the Apache Tomcat binaries. As a result, you must download a JMX 1.2 implementation (such as the Sun Reference Implementation) and copy the JAR containing the API and implementation of the JMX specification to: ${catalina.home}/bin/jmx.jar


This article describes the workaround that I discovered to make Tomcat 5.0 work correctly inside Eclipse.

Tracking spam origination using qmail and vpopmail

One of the challenges on the web at the moment is that many sites want you to register a “free” userid just to do the most mundane thing (such as downloading a file, viewing a picture, etc). While I don’t have a problem with that requirement in general, I am often quite sceptical about what they plan to do with my userid.

There is a common technique that many people use where they create a site-specific version of their email address (I believed it is often called “plussed email addressing”). For example, let’s say that my actual address is edwardaux@mydomain.com and I wanted to signup to flickr, I could
create an email address called edwardaux-flickr@mydomain.com and use that (and tell my mail server to forward all email to that address to my real edwardaux@mydomain.com address). The nice thing about this is that if flickr is naughty (not that I am suggesting they are) and sells/gives my email address to spammers, I can immediately determine that by looking at who the email was addressed to.

The problem with this approach is that I have to go into my mail server ahead of time and manually create each site-specific email address. That is a bit of a hassle, and I am sure that I can get away with a simpler approach.

Configuring Tomcat5 and Apache2 to run with multiple instances

This describes the process for configuring Tomcat 5 on Ubuntu (or Debian) so that you can have multiple instances of Tomcat running. Typically, this would be useful when you have several domains (and/or applications) hosted on the one server and want to keep them running independantly of one another.

The general steps are based loosely on an article in LinuxJournal, however, I have added afew more explanations, corrected a couple of little inaccuracies and added new content to describe the Apache2 mechanism for loading modules and sites.