Microsoft Office Communicator chat history

Microsoft stinks, and his products are bloated with useless cosmetic features and lack essential stuff.
Communicator is so ridiculous that it doesn't even keep a chat history, so if you close the chat window you lose all the information. Only a total moron could wish that. Microsoft does. "Tools/View Conversation History" simply doesn't work here. This because the option "Save my instant message conversations in the Outlook Conversations History folder" (in tools/options) is disabled, and I don't have rights to enable it, even with a tweak in the Registry by setting IMAutoArchivingPolicy to 1.

Here is a tiny product that saves all chat history:
http://mscommunicatorhistor.codeplex.com/
You should start it on Windows Startup.

JProfiler connection through SSH Tunnel

If you don't want to open a firewall for JProfiler, here is a simple trick:
- on the monitored server, run the startManagedWebLogic_jprofiler.sh
- make sure the port 8849 is being listened to (netstat -an | grep 8849)
- open putty
- open a connection to your monitored server, using this setting for SSH tunnel:

(the obscured hostname is the FQDN of the monitored server)

you will notice that on your laptop, BEFORE the connection you have nothing on port 8849, while AFTER you have a LOCAL port open, and being forwarded to the remote host:

netstat -an | find "8849"
  TCP    127.0.0.1:8849         0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
  TCP    [::1]:8849             [::]:0                 LISTENING

netstat -an | find "10.56.10.126"
  TCP    10.240.21.73:58756     10.56.10.126:22        ESTABLISHED
  TCP    10.240.21.73:58944     10.56.10.126:22        ESTABLISHED
  TCP    10.240.21.73:58969     10.56.10.126:22        ESTABLISHED

(10.56.80.126 is the remote IP, 10.240.21.73 is the local IP... you see several connections, one is my putty open, the others are Tunnel)

You can now open your JProfiler session, but make it point to localhost:8849, not to the remotehost:8849. It works!

Configuring JProfiler for WebLogic

Download and install JProfiler 7.2 (the latest is 8 at the time of writing). Enter the licensing information. Run the Session/Integration/New Remote Integration.

Then remote Application Server:

this means that it will generate jprofiler_agent_linux-x64.tar.gz in c:\temp
you must previously have copied startWebLogic.sh (from the DOMAIN_HOME/bin folder) to your c:\temp folder. In the snapshot below I have tried with startManagedWebLogic.sh, but this is NOT recognized as a valid script.... please replace it with startWebLogic.sh script!

as said, startManagedWebLogic.sh is not recognized... use startWebLogic.sh instead!

this time it will work:

and at this point we are ready to attach:

but fiirst you must prepare the Application Server (the Managed Server)


sudo mkdir /opt/jprofiler
sudo chmod soa:soa /opt/jprofiler

The file jprofiler_agent_linux-x64.tar.gz will be created in c:\temp. Copy it to the /opt/jprofiler folder, then:
tar xvzf jprofiler_agent_linux-x64.tar.gz  

and that's it for the libraries.

The modification done in startWebLogic.sh is:  
added on top:
JAVA_VENDOR=Sun  

added above this line: echo "starting weblogic with Java version:":

JAVA_VM=
export JAVA_VM
JPROFILER_OPTIONS="-agentpath:/opt/jprofiler/bin/linux-x64/libjprofilerti.so=port=8849,nowait $JPROFILER_OPTIONS"
export JPROFILER_OPTIONS

changed:

echo "starting weblogic with Java version:"

${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java ${JAVA_VM} -version

if [ "${WLS_REDIRECT_LOG}" = "" ] ; then
 echo "Starting WLS with line:"
 echo "${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java ${JPROFILER_OPTIONS} ${JAVA_VM} ${MEM_ARGS} -Dweblogic.Name=${SERVER_NAME} -Djava.security.policy=${WL_HOME}/server/lib/weblogic.policy ${JAVA_OPTIONS} ${PROXY_SETTINGS} ${SERVER_CLASS}"
 ${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java ${JPROFILER_OPTIONS} ${JAVA_VM} ${MEM_ARGS} -Dweblogic.Name=${SERVER_NAME} -Djava.security.policy=${WL_HOME}/server/lib/weblogic.policy ${JAVA_OPTIONS} ${PROXY_SETTINGS} ${SERVER_CLASS}
else
 echo "Redirecting output from WLS window to ${WLS_REDIRECT_LOG}"
 ${JAVA_HOME}/bin/java ${JPROFILER_OPTIONS} ${JAVA_VM} ${MEM_ARGS} -Dweblogic.Name=${SERVER_NAME} -Djava.security.policy=${WL_HOME}/server/lib/weblogic.policy ${JAVA_OPTIONS} ${PROXY_SETTINGS} ${SERVER_CLASS}  >"${WLS_REDIRECT_LOG}" 2>&1 
fi

The JPROFILER_OPTIONS add a agentpath pointing to the jprofiles libraries in charge of doing the instrumentation and profiling.

BEWARE: if you copy the startWebLogic_jprofiler.sh from a different domain, make sure you change the DOMAIN_HOME !

At this point we must change the startManagedWebLogic.sh and startWebLogic.sh scripts to add the JProfiler libraries.... we shall clone the existing scripts, to allow normal operations to be unaffected.

cd DOMAIN_HOME/bin
cp startManagedWebLogic.sh startManagedWebLogic_jprofiler.sh
vi startManagedWebLogic_jprofiler.sh
change the 2 occurrences of startWebLogic.sh into startWebLogic_jprofiler.sh

copy to DOMAIN_HOME/bin the startWebLogic_jprofiler.sh generated by the jprofiler wizard

to start the profield server, run ./startManagedWebLogic_jprofiler.sh osbpp4ms1 (or whatever is your managed server name).

In the logs you should see:

JProfiler> Protocol version 37
JProfiler> Using JVMTI
JProfiler> JVMTI version 1.1 detected.
JProfiler> 64-bit library
JProfiler> Don't wait for frontend to connect.
JProfiler> Starting up without initial configuration.
JProfiler> Listening on port: 8849.
JProfiler> Instrumenting native methods.
JProfiler> Can retransform classes.
JProfiler> Can retransform any class.
JProfiler> Native library initialized
JProfiler> VM initialized
JProfiler> Hotspot compiler enabled

And you are ready to connect and profile.

Happy profiling!