Surefire/Failsafe maven plugin and SSL

I was puzzled today by an interesting feature introduced by the "surefire" and "failsafe" maven plugins (used for unit/integration test my components). These were introduced with their 2.1 release.  As I had components calling web services using 2-way SSL for authentication, I noticed that my test cases where failing when using maven via command line (mvn clean install). They worked on the IDE (Eclipse/STS) fine, but were not working on the command line. I saw the following error:

PKIX path building failed: ... unable to find valid certification path to requested target

 So it was clear that maven was not passing the SSL system properties from my .mavenrc file:


This is what I discovered as I read more the documentation.

2-Way SSL in JBoss 7.1.1

As I tried to setup 2-way SSL in JBOSS 7.1.1, the documentation kept on referring to 1-way SSL (even though it was not clearly stated so). I was looking for a simple configuration that will enable a certificate to be used as authentication and to be used in a 2-way SSL protocol. Given that the documentation was not properly describing how to do this, I found a post pointing to check XSD documents to see what other configuration options are available in JBOSS. As I was simply trying to configure in "standalone" mode, this is what I did:

Monitoring Weblogic remotely using JMX

It has been a while since I had to use Weblogic for deployment. Furthermore, I wanted to monitor my application using MBeans. As I tried to do this, I encountered many problems (e.g. unknown host name,  ClassNotFoundException, ssh problems, etc). These are my notes about what I had in front of me and how I solved them.