Understanding the Dream – The Blog of Jordan Michaels

Server-side upload verification with Taffy and Lucee

May 10, 2023 utdream Comments 0 Comment

I was dismayed to learn recently that every image upload process I had ever developed before now was vulnerable to improper file uploads. Like many developers, I used the HTML <input type=”file”> type form fields to allow users to upload images. I made sure to restrict (I thought) those uploads to just images, but it turns out that a lot of the “security” around image uploads is based on nothing more than the file extension or, even worse, on the…

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Random String Generator for CFML

March 20, 2023 utdream Comments 0 Comment

Working on a CFML-based project using components and figured I could document this for my own personal user later. If it helps someone else along the way, even better. Once the method is made, you just invoke the method with the cfinvoke tag. Since I put my component in my /utils/strings.cfc directory, I could use the following: I did not specify the charset, because my default will work for my purposes, but you can customize the characters that the random…

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[OpenStack] Clearing out a Dead VM

December 5, 2019 utdream Comments 0 Comment

While working on an OpenStack cloud (the ‘Train” release), I ran into an issue where a VM did not get created properly because my controller didn’t (fully) see my compute node. This created an issue where the VM was not assigned to any host, and a misleading and incorrect error that was reported as a “Permission Denied” error. Here’s the I got from the nova-api.log: So… can’t create a working VM, then can’t delete the bad VM. How do I…

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Merge (or Resize) the /home partition on CentOS 7

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 3 comments

CentOS7 by default partitions your storage by putting a large amount of space in the /home directory partition. For most use-cases, this is perfectly fine. However, if you’re working with limited space, and have already installed a default install of CentOS, you may find you need to reclaim some of the space in your /home parition for use with other partitions. Before continuing, you will want to MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR /HOME DIRECTORY if there’s anything in it you…

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Quick Random Password Generator for Perl

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 1 comment

Mostly writing this for my own future benefit, but if this can help someone else in the process, perfect. Basically, create random strings of random sizes using random characters until the size of the resulting string is greater than 16. Pretty simple. #!/usr/bin/perl my @alphanumeric = (‘a’..’z’, ‘A’..’Z’, 0..9,’!’,’_’,’-‘); my @numeric = (0..9); my $randpassword = ”; until ( length($randpassword) > 16 ) { $randpassword = $randpassword . join ”, map $alphanumeric[rand @alphanumeric], 0..(rand @numeric); } print “$randpassword\n” Save the…

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Steam won’t start on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit with AMD GPU

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 0 Comment

I run two PC’s with AMD GPU’s and with the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, I have been unable to run steam using the default grpahics drivers that come with steam. Clicking the steam icon, just made it flash for a little bit, but steam never started. To get more detail, I tried running steam from the command-line, and I got the following error message: jordan@jordan-H8DI3:~$ steam Running Steam on ubuntu 16.04 64-bit STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically grep: symbol…

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How to fix Lucee ‘Handler “BonCode-Tomcat-CFM-Handler” has a bad module “ManagedPipelineHandler” in its module list’ Error.

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 1 comment

For whatever reason IIS likes to set the default version of .NET on some versions of IIS to 2.0. This is generally rediculous since 4.0 has been around for some time and even when 4.0 is installed and working, MS will default to 2.0. If you install Lucee server on to your windows server and get this error, there are several possible causes: 1) You need to use a more recent version of .NET for your application pool. The fix…

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Methods to address a slow Tomcat/Railo/Lucee startup

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 0 Comment

Recently my technicians and I encountered an issue with a hosting customer who had an interesting situation between two VPS Accounts that he owns. The first VPS had a relatively quick startup time (under a minute), and the second VPS had an extremely slow startup time (above 5 minutes). Both VM’s were relatively similar, and both served a great number of sites. The following are the two options that corrected the issue: OPTION 1 Set property in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/catalina.properties: org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.jarsToSkip=*.jar This…

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Railo/Lucee CGI remote_addr/remote_host says 127.0.0.1

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 0 Comment

When installed on to a Linux/Apache machine, the Railo installers will install mod_proxy_http as the default connector for Apache to Tomcat/Railo. The result is the same as you’d get with any other proxy, where the remote host is replaced with the address of the proxy (in this case 127.0.0.1) and the original requester’s IP address is placed in the “X-Forward-For” header. If you need to find the original requestors IP address you can accomplish this in one of two easy…

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Apache 2.4 – 403 Forbidden (AH01630: client denied by server configuration)

October 31, 2018 utdream Comments 0 Comment

I recently updated one of my development machines to Ubuntu 13.10 which now uses Apache 2.4 by default. In my case, I had updated a machine that was previously running Ubuntu version 13.04 and had been running Apache 2.2. After the upgrade, I was disturbed to find that none of my sites worked! I kept getting Apache 403 (Forbidden) error messages. I figured the upgrade had changed my configurations or something… but after fruitlessly messing with the config files (and…

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