Providing solutions that work.
25 Jan 2019
I posted a new blog entry on my Unicon blog:
If you have reviewed both of my previous postings, you likely noticed that both TIER and Unicon have images for the same applications. Where there is overlap, the TIER images are the officially supported images…
14 Aug 2018
I posted a new blog entry on my Unicon blog:
Unicon recently completed a project for the Colorado School of Mines (link is external) to setup a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that can be used as a template for their work modernizing their application deployment processes going forward…
01 Nov 2016
I posted a new blog entry on my Unicon blog:
You have paid your InCommon membership dues, your federation admins have been vetted, and you even uploaded your IdP metadata in the InCommon Federation Manager website. Like many new members, you are probably asking yourself, “Now what?”…
16 Feb 2016
I posted a new blog entry on my Unicon blog:
Many Shibboleth IdP adopters use LDAP as provide both an authentication provider and an attribute source. There is always the question of “do we need to configure TLS/SSL for the IdP’s connection to the LDAP server(s)?”. My response is “always” because we need to protect the user’s credentials even in the most trusted network. My question back to the client, “Why wouldn’t you?”. Often the response is somewhere between “we’ve tried and we got it to work once, but then it broke sometime” and “we could never get it to work”…
05 Nov 2015
I posted a new blog entry on my Unicon blog:
A common task when running a SAML Identity Provider (IdP) is integrating additional SAML service providers (SP). This task is not a trivial one, especially when compared to integrating CAS clients. New IdP administrators can run into problems before they even start with the technical task at hand because they aren’t given the correct information to be successful. The request to do an integration usually goes something like this…
02 Feb 2015
URL shorteners can be nice, but they hide the destination, which is really not a secure thing. Joshua Long has a great post on how to expand the shortened url and covers a whole slew of providers.
Check out his post at http://security.thejoshmeister.com/2009/04/how-to-preview-shortened-urls-tinyurl.html.
18 Jun 2014
I love stumbling upon tidbits that make my life simpler. Colin Miller has several post on command-line hacks. Here’s a couple I appreciate:
He also has an article on tmux. I’ve been a fan of tmux for several years. It has lots of goodies, but my favorite by far is the ability to reattach to a session that got disrupted by a drop in mobile data or a wireless router/dsl modem reset.
A couple of other interesting tmux links:
24 Mar 2014
Last month, I was featured in a Unicon, Inc. press release with a few of my fellow colleagues.
Here’s my highlight:
John Gasper comes to Unicon with 15 years in IT at Eastern Washington University and experience with Ellucian’s Banner Student and Banner Enterprise Identity Services (BEIS); and Microsoft’s Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) and AD Federation Services (ADFS). While at Eastern Washington University John developed and contributed ADFS support for the CAS server. He is currently contributing to Internet2’s Scalable Privacy project via the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure (GPII) project.
I also like this quote:
These new colleagues enhance Unicon’s ability to deliver exceptional value across a range of open source IAM components,” said Bill Thompson, IAM Practice Director.
I think it is so true. I belief the old and new IAM team members compliments each other very well.
Check out the complete release on PRWeb.
14 Mar 2014
So I’m wrapping up my first business trip working for Unicon. Unlike at Eastern, I was responsible for making all of my travel arrangements so I thought I’d use an online “travel agency”. My first thought was back to the cute little gnome ads, which led me to Travelocity… but I was quickly disappointed.
I easily booked my three flights (on two itineraries) and my rental car at my final destination. After I did this, I created a Travelocity account and wanted to link the itineraries to my account. After spending some time looking all over the Travelocity website trying to do it, I gave up. I finally called them thinking it would be a quick call. It was anything but quick or easy…
The agent that took my call didn’t understand what I was asking for. She put me on hold several times apparently to ask for help. Eventually she understood that I wanted something on the website to work. So she brought up the web page and helped me do it step by step… Unfortunately she was only helping me to pull up my itinerary. Finally she got what I wanted to do. Again, I went on hold.
After about 45 minutes of being on the phome she told me that it was impossible to link itineraries not created with an account to a new account. The only thing that they could do was cancel the itinerary, give me a refund, and then I could purchase the flights/rental again under my account. Really?!?
Being a computer guy I was shocked. Why was this seemingly easy process not available. Pretty much every airline I’ve ever used has let me connect an itinerary to my airline account after the fact. Even as I write this, I can see the location on the database table where my itinerary sits with a null account key. Why couldn’t I just reach in and fix it. sigh. I have concluded whether right or wrong that Travelocity is probably such a legacy system that it’s not feasible to add such functionality. I also noticed that Travelocity insist on storing my name in CAPITAL letters. To me, this totally smacks of mainframe.
So, I had them cancel my flights, but I was not going use Travelocity again. So I looked elsewhere.
My wife suggested Orbitz, so I took a look. I didn’t actually do a true test and re-create the itinerary before creating/logging into an account… but I noticed immediately that Orbitz’s website was more fluid and just seemed more polished. Re-creating my flights was just as good, if not, a better experience. I was pleased.
So my question(s) to fellow Netizens is, “Is Orbitz the best online travel agency? Is there something better? What do you suggest?”
*This post reflects my views and does not necessarily represents the views of my employer: Unicon, Inc.
21 Feb 2014
So after being a Microsoft Windows person for forever… when my new company let me choose between a PC and a Mac I decided to go with a Mac Book Pro. Almost everyone on my team was using them, so I figured why not. One of my co-workers told me about Time Machine, so it was one of the first features I enabled.
Time Machine backups everything, and I only wanted it to back up documents, git & svn working copies, etc. It turns out you can only exclude items. (If you are reading this you know what I’m talking about.) After a while of playing I got my backups down to a few gigs, but that didn’t last long. I started adding apps and those apps started storing their own data (~/Library/) and it grew quickly. Within in a couple of months my backups where 27gb and my backup drive was only 20gb (well, I allocated 20gb on drive connected to my router). I needed to find this massive store of data, and I couldn’t find anything on the web to help me.
Eventually I worked this out…
find ~ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 tmutil isexcluded > ~/dump.txt
This iterates over ever directory (in this case starting in my home directory, ~), and runs it through Time Machine’s command line utility (tmutil) calling the isexcluded directive. isexcluded will report back whether a given file or directory is included or excluded from the back. Finally, the results are dumped into the dump.txt file in the home directory.
It only took me a few minutes of looking through dump.txt to realize the culprit of my issue, ~/Library. Now I’m back down to a base backup set of 4gb.
Hopefully this can help out someone else on the Interweb.
Disclaimer: Excluding hidden directories should be done with caution. There is a reason they are hidden, some of the data maybe important to you. Don’t exclude directories unless you know how it will impact you if you ever need to recover.
17 Feb 2014
Hello world,
This is the obligatory first post.