Monthly Archives: October 2010

HOWTO monitor Tomcat with monit and munin in Debian

I have an existing Tomcat installation in production that has been running hot and causing monit to send me notices that such and such service is down, only to come back clear on the next run. Of course since I use monit I can see that the service was never restarted, plus I’ve never had this happen on other servers with monit, so I’m convinced that Tomcat, with its hunger for Java, is the culrprit here. I’ve been running munin for years on this server too, however I never got the Tomcat plugins to work with it, so I can’t gauge how hot Tomcat is running, and how changing the heap size is effecting things. Because of this, yesterday I got serious about it and finally got it working, but I had to take an end run to get it rolling and it wasn’t fun; which is why I’m posting it here. If anyone knows a better way to do this, please share in the comments and I’ll update this, but here’s how I was successful.

HOWTO set Facebook privacy settings

While I’m working on a Facebook inspired privacy discovery project, I need to highly recommend that everyone take the time to review their the official Facebook privacy settings page to understand how data about you is used and shared, but in a nutshell Facebook tells us:

Your name, profile picture, gender and networks are always open to everyone. We suggest leaving the other basic settings below open to everyone to make it easier for real world friends to find and connect with you.

You need to understand that this lack of privacy also makes you *more* available to their advertisers, which is what they’re really pushing for, identity theft and other potential crimes (ie- stalking). You need to login to Facebook and then click on the text Account on the top left side of the screen, and then choose Privacy Settings in that dropdown. (or if you’re logged in, click here). Take a look at these screen shots below, first is the Recommended settings Facebook presents to you: