Installing EJBCA on Azure Virtual Machine. 2014, December 12

For a while in the background I was wondering are there any open source PKI software which would have rich functionality and was at the same time reliable, with web based interface and with support of SCEP. Looks like I found one - EJBCA.

Below I am describing how I installed it on the VM hosted in the Windows Azure Cloud.

  1. Using Azure management portal, created new Virtual Machine from gallery - Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
    Note: If you have MSDN subscription, then you should have Azure credits, which you can use towards using Azure service liek VM on the cloud, web site, or others. Refer to Microsot Azure web site for details.
  2. Enabled endpoints for SSH (port 22), and RDP, and https (publicv port 443, private port 8443, as EJBCA uses this port by default).
    Note: to connect to the Ubuntu VM over SSH you can use the tool called PuTTY).
  3. Connected to the created VM over SSH. Installed xrdp following instructions given on http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=5305 (basically it is installing xrdp itself and then installing xfce desktop environment and assiciating it with xfce). After that was able to connect to it from my laptop running Windows 8.
    In case if the given above link is broken, here are the commands to run:
    Installed firefox (sudo apt-get install firefox)
    1. sudo apt-get install xrdp
    2. sudo apt-get update
    3. sudo apt-get install xfce4
    4. echo xfce4-session >~/.xsession
  5. Launched firefox from terminal, and opened EJBCA web site, Documentation / Installation / Ubuntu quick start page.
  6. Installed OpenJDK following instructions;
  7. Downloaded JBOSS and EJBCA following instructions. Note that there was newer version of the EJBCA then referred in the documentaion, I did download newer one (ejbca_ce_6_2_0.zip).
    wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/ejbca/files/ejbca6/ejbca_6_2_0/ejbca_ce_6_2_0.zip
  8. Followed further instrauctions, and finally got EJBCA web configuration site running.

SVN Cleanup problem. 2013, August.

Today I encountered the problem described here:

svn cleanup failed–previous operation has not finished; run cleanup if it was interrupted

Usually, an svn cleanup fixes most issues with tortoise svn. However, I ran into an issue which caused me some grief. 

The specific error I was seeing:
Previous operation has not finished; run 'cleanup' if it was interrupted

Solution:

Somehow, svn is stuck on the previous operation. We need to remove this operation from it’s ‘work queue’. 
The data is stored in the wc.db sqllite database in the offending folder.
  • 1. Install sqllite (32 bit binary for windows) from here
  • 2. sqlite .svn/wc.db “select * from work_queue”
  • The SELECT should show you your offending folder/file as part of the work queue. What you need to do is delete this item from the work queue.
  •      3. sqlite .svn/wc.db “delete from work_queue”
  • That’s it. Now, you can run cleanup again – and it should work. Or you can proceed directly to the task you were doing before being prompted to run cleanup (adding a new file etc.)
  • Also, svn.exe (a command line tool) is part of the Tortoise installer – but is unchecked for some reason. Just run the installer again, choose ‘modify’ and select the ‘command line tools’.