Just Journal Developer Blog

Just Journal was updated to fix a number of CVEs in third party libraries.

We've added web finger support to just journal as well as some rate limiting.

We just updated justjournal with a few bug fixes:
1. fix login issue with windows, command line clients

2. Add spring4shell mitigation.

We started getting a lot of attacks against log4j2 vulnerability and had to take the site down until a patch was put in place.

Just updated spring boot and a slew of other libraries. Initial testing looks good except for the pdf output. That seems to be broken.

JustJournal has been updated to use MySQL 8.x from 5.7.x.

Added a new feature in preferences to allow you to delete your journal.  

Fixed several bugs and updated several libraries for security updates.

A new release of justjournal is available. It is mostly a security update to spring boot 2.2 but also includes some new trackback functionality.

JustJournal was converted to spring sometime ago.  Recently spring boot was updated to 2.x.  Additionally the minimum version of MySQL is now 5.7.

Happy to announce the availability of Just Journal 2.2.1. This release fixes many issues with the site including:

1. Comments are working again.
2. Favorites are working.
3. Performance has improved considerably. We can now handle 170 requests per second with the current hardware.
4. Issues creating new accounts have been fixed.
5. The application is now using spring boot

Last week, we did a major upgrade on the database server.  A bug introduced in the latest MySQL release has broken a database component we used throughout the site.  This was Sun's old CachedRowSet.  

As a result, any SQL query using named parameters (something AS somethingelse) is broken. Some queries I can remove the offending as statement on, but others this is not possible due to ambiguity. I've decided to take this opportunity to migrate some of the site to an ORM called Apache Cayenne.  I've used it with several other projects and it's quite good.  This also has a side effect of avoiding the problem with MySQL.  

Normally I would have migrated back to the previous version, but it was a little complicated this time.  I appologize for the down time and will continue to fix things on the site as I get a chance. Remember, I have a day job. 

Work has begun on the next generation of Just Journal.  I spent a few hours tonight working on the rewrite of just journal.  The new version will take advantage of newer technologies that have come out since the site was created.  

The current plan is to use much of the existing data access code and business logic (but refactored a bit) with a new front end.  This will allow me to finally get the website design standardized after all these years.  I'm going to drop Maverick and move to a newer Apache framework as well as drop JSP pages on the site.  

Once this phase of development is complete, I plan on migrating to Apache Cayenne.  A few things are already using it, but there is much to do yet.

I plan on keeping the old servlet around for some time to post blog entries as most of the gui and command line clients use this.  The C clients uses the xml-rpc interface, and i may start migrating the .NET client and java clients in that direction.   

This is a good time to put in for feature requests.  I've already had several lately related to image handling and pictures.  

The second hard drive was installed tonight in the server.  The site might be slow as the second drive is synced.  It could take a few hours.  

The new drives are western digital black 1.5TB.  The old drive that failed was a seagate 7200.11 750GB (china factory) . I'll probably RMA the seagate drive and use it for something else. It happens.  

I had to replace a faulty hard drive today.  The server was down for four hours.  I'll have to bring it down again later this week to get a second drive in for the raid and remount it.  

I've noticed some bugs with IE 9 on the site.  (mostly drop down boxes for security settings on post)

I'll look into updating Dojo soon to fix this.

I appologize for the downtime last night.  The server had a kernel panic (crashed) due to an excessive amount of traffic from Yandex combined with a lot of DNS traffic and some internal processes that happen in the evenings.  I can't say it won't happen again, but I'm looking into ways to minimize the possibility.

I did another hardware upgrade today.   The server is now in an iStarUSA rackmount case with additional drive capacity (2 new hard drives).   

The website is now running on an AMD Athlon II X4 (quad core) with 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM on an AMD 760 based Asus motherboard.  Hopefully it will be a little faster. The old system was an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13Ghz with 4GB DDR2 667 on an Intel DP965LT.  

I managed to do a dump and restore to upgrade the hard drive last night.  This morning, when i went to switch over the power supply failed.  We were down at least 12 hours total.  Sorry about that. 

There was some site downtime tonight due to a storm and a tripped GFI outlet.  I decided to get clever and put in the new hard drive for the server since it was down anyway.  However, it's a new WD Green advanced format (EARS) drive which requires a strange partition table.  (the alignment is off)  Long story short, I had to bring the server back up with the old drive for now.