Creating users in a SQL Azure database

... is not as straight forward as you would think. It has some slightly different requirements for syntax than what you'd normally use to create users in a local or on-premise SQL Server instance.

You can see the tutorial page on MSDN here.

Slow login times in Ubuntu 13.10 (not just SSH)

I recently setup a new install of Ubuntu 13.10 for a server and found that a lot of my login times were slow when remotely logging in (and not just via SSH). The culprit turned out to the the /etc/nsswitch.conf file:

This line:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns 4 mdns

Should be changed to this line:
hosts: files dns

... to resolve the issue

Resolving slow SSH login times

At work, like most other organizations, we have a Linux server that we access via SSH. However, lately, I've found my use of it skyrocketing in order to test software, and log-ins and file copying have been very slow. In my efforts to find out why, I found out that sshd has in its configuration file a setting called 'UseDNS'. The default is 'yes', so even if this setting is commented out, it will try to perform reverse DNS lookups on the IP addresses of users logging in. This would be a bad thing for us, especially since we have this box locked down and unable to contact any DNS servers. After disabling DNS lookups, my login and file copy time dropped to near 0. I hope this helps somebody.

*EDIT:* I've also encountered this problem on the BeagleBone Black boards which I've recently acquired for use in a project.

More Tomcat quirks

I recently ran across a problem with receiving a LinkageError in one of my web applications. The problem occurred when Acegi security tried to use libraries that were not yet loaded and tried to load them itself. Strangely, the error only occurred while using my RESTful API with a Spring Framework controller. If I logged in through my web interface which uses Acegi and Spring MVC, then the linkage error didn't occur.

After numerous hours of Googling around, I found a small company's JIRA issue tracker that reported the same bug, but also that it only occurred when using the security manager. After disabling the security manager on my own Tomcat instance, I found that the problem went away. I'd very much like to have a better resolution, but it's going to have to do for the time being.