Don’t migrate to the new Firefox Sync

In the last release, Firefox introduced a new Sync version, the feature with which you can synchronize your passwords, history, addons etc. For more information on Sync, go here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/sync/

However, when I migrated just today, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am given that:

  • You can NOT sync you passwords if you have a master password (which, in my standpoint, is necessary to have) (Link to the documentation stating this)
  • You can NOT roll back to the old Sync feature (on Firefox 29) (or not that I know of)

So here I am, stuck with the new Sync on one of my devices, with no way to sync my passwords except if I chose to store them insecurely on my computer. That’s just great, especially because synchronizing passwords was the number one reason I used Sync (as I have a unique password per website). My only advice: don’t migrate to the new Sync (yet).

Glassfish 2.x and OpenJDK

Here is a small article about Glassfish and OpenJDK as I’ve had an error and have not found the solution anywhere else.

When installing Glassfish 2.2 on Linux, I had this error message:

/opt/glassfish/setup-cluster.xml:160: Glassfish requires JDK 1.5 or higher, you have java version "1.7.0_03-icedtea"

This happens when I try to build the setup-cluster.xml file with ant:

sudo ant -f setup-cluster.xml

After too many hours of research, I’ve seen that the Java version was checked in a wrong way in the XML file. It needs Java >= 1.5 and I have Java 1.7, but the script only checks if the Java version is 1.6 or 1.5, so I’ve added the third line, so the test passes if the version is 1.7:

<condition property="java.version.acceptable"> 
  <or>
    <contains string="${targeted.java.version}" substring="1.5"/>
    <contains string="${targeted.java.version}" substring="1.6"/>
    <contains string="${targeted.java.version}" substring="1.7"/>
  </or> 
</condition>

I’ve tried this after reading http://www.ensode.net/java_fedora_8_icedtea.html and according to the author, glassfish-installer-v2-b58g doesn’t work with OpenJDK even with this trick, but it works fine with glassfish 2.1.1_b31g-1 (the current version in ArchLinux’s AUR repository).

PS: for those who have Arch, the ant command is located in /usr/share/java/apache-ant/bin/ which is not usually in the PATH.