X11 session login with SLiM and no password

Basically task is to allow my mum login to home Linux-box and not to bother her with a password (or I would have to install Windoze again). At same time I want to still have access to same box with my own passworded account and to be able to login (with SLiM) to a X11 session.

I'm not going to dig into security considerations regarding passwordless users here.

So firstly let's create a user for my mum and deprive it a password:
# useradd -m -U username
# passwd -d username

Explanation:
-m force home directory creation
-U automatically creates a group with same name as username and assigns it as primary group for new user
passwd -d removes password from given account

Now you should be able to login with new user into physical terminal session. Though this depends on PAM configuration in your distro (I'm using ArchLinux). You won't be able to su to this user or login into SLiM yet.
To allow SLiM login you with empty password you need to edit /etc/pam.d/slim:
find
auth    required    pam_unix.so
and change to
auth    required    pam_unix.so nullok

That's it. Same instructions should apply to any login manager, not only SLiM.

Debugging SSL traffic with socat

Often when developing a client for a remote service using HTTPS (or any SSL-tunneled protocol) it difficult to dig into the data being transferred over the network. That is the case for me and here is another cheat sheet for me:

# socat -v TCP-LISTEN:443,reuseaddr,debug,fork OPENSSL:remote.host.com:443,verify=0

This sets up a SSL tunnel, accepting non-encrypted traffic from one side, encrypting it and passing to remote host.
Then you should use localhost:443 as a connection endpoint from your piece of software and watch all the traffic being sent :)
For detail on socat option take a look at documentation.

DSRA0080E Data Store Adapter exception on IBM WebSphere EJB client

More like a hint for myself :)

Exception like this:

...
Caused by: com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.exceptions.DataStoreAdapterException: DSRA0080E: An exception was received by the Data Store Adapter. See original exception message: com/ibm/websphere/rsadapter/DataStoreHelper.doConnectionSetupPerGetConnection(Ljava/sql/Connection;ZLjava/lang/Object;)Z.
  at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.spi.WSRdbManagedConnectionImpl.getConnection(WSRdbManagedConnectionImpl.java:3503)
  at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.spi.WSDefaultConnectionManagerImpl.allocateConnection(WSDefaultConnectionManagerImpl.java:91)
  at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.jdbc.WSJdbcDataSource.getConnection(WSJdbcDataSource.java:646)
  ... 22 more
Caused by: java.lang.AbstractMethodError: com/ibm/websphere/rsadapter/DataStoreHelper.doConnectionSetupPerGetConnection(Ljava/sql/Connection;ZLjava/lang/Object;)Z
  at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.spi.WSRdbManagedConnectionImpl.getConnection(WSRdbManagedConnectionImpl.java:3482)
  ... 24 more

may be caused by running EJB client application with different (e.g. non-IBM) Java VM.