Category: Technology

SLA

Last night I was part of a pan­el speak­ing to the SLA WCC. This is an inter­est­ing bunch of people, the lib­rar­i­ans for vari­ous com­pan­ies, gov­ern­ment depart­ments, and of course uni­ver­sit­ies. The pan­el (every­one else was a lib­rar­i­an) was speak­ing about blogs and wikis and how they are being used with­in their organ­iz­a­tions. To be more pre­cise, the oth­er four speak­ers talked about how their organ­iz­a­tions use these tech­no­lo­gies, while I did a bit of a wrap-up at the end with lots of pretty pic­tures, talk­ing about some of the things people need to think about when deploy­ing. My slides are here; be warned that the file is fairly big (all those pictures!)

With five speak­ers in not much more than an hour, we did­n’t have a lot of time to go into detail. Check out the pro­gramme for the list of speak­ers and a brief sum­mary of what they talked about.

One thing I found inter­est­ing when talk­ing to people at the meet­ing was the almost uni­ver­sal theme of how hard it was to get the IT depart­ment to do things. The suc­cess­ful deploy­ments either had the ini­ti­at­ive come down from on high, so IT had to imple­ment it, or they were using out­side-hos­ted free ser­vices (which has its own issues). 

And then there was the issue of get­ting people to con­trib­ute to the wiki or blog; not as easy as it may sound. Tracey Car­mi­chael talked about how the BC Secur­it­ies Com­mis­sion uses a wiki intern­ally to track new types of invest­ments, and poin­ted out that many people who have strong opin­ions in dis­cus­sions did­n’t want to com­mit those to a wiki. She thought maybe they were nervous of writ­ing some­thing that was later found to be incor­rect; I wondered how much is due to people not wish­ing to be seen to speak for oth­ers. These sorts of issues prob­ably also have a large organ­iz­a­tion­al cul­ture com­pon­ent to them — in Sun I haven’t noticed any reti­cence to using wikis (except for maybe a lack of time and motiv­a­tion for con­trib­ut­ing con­tent) so they are used a lot for pro­jects in my experience.

Naming Names

Phil Karlton said (at least once in my hear­ing any­way) that nam­ing things was one of the two hard tasks in com­puter sci­ence (read­ing X Toolkit Intrins­ics — C Lan­guage Inter­face, to which he con­trib­uted, will give you some idea why he said it); I dis­covered the truth of this yet again when writ­ing the FAQ for our Iden­tity Pro­vider for Open­ID. In this case, it was even more con­vo­luted, being about what to name the thing that names names.

When a Sun employ­ee signs up at the Sun IdP there is no neces­sity for them to put their real names in the fields marked “first name” and “sur­name”; they can use a fic­ti­tious name if they choose (or put noth­ing at all). In com­mon Eng­lish, this fic­ti­tious name is often called a pseud­onym. The vari­ous dictionary.com defin­i­tions of pseud­onym would seem to fit this usage very well, so I was pre­par­ing to use it in the FAQ. Except for, it turns out that those steeped in iden­tity man­age­ment ter­min­o­logy tend to find that plain-Eng­lish usage of the word confusing. 

In SAML, for example, a pseud­onym is defined as A pri­vacy-pre­serving name iden­ti­fi­er assigned by a pro­vider to identi­fy a prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party for an exten­ded peri­od of time that spans mul­tiple ses­sions; can be used to rep­res­ent an iden­tity fed­er­a­tion. In Liberty Alli­ance work, the defin­i­tion is An arbit­rary iden­ti­fi­er assigned by the iden­tity or ser­vice pro­vider to identi­fy a Prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party so that the name has mean­ing only in the con­text of the rela­tion­ship between the parties. The same or sim­il­ar mean­ing is used with­in WS-Secur­ity (the user iden­tity [is] provided in a SAML asser­tion as a pseud­onym) and WS-Fed­er­a­tion (A pseud­onym ser­vice allows a prin­cip­al to have dif­fer­ent ali­ases at dif­fer­ent resources/services or in dif­fer­ent realms, and to option­ally have the pseud­onym change per-ser­vice or per-login).

So in order to make life easi­er for those poor, eas­ily con­fused iden­tity man­age­ment experts, I’ll be using the term “fic­ti­tious name” in the FAQ, where I would oth­er­wise have used “pseud­onym”, an added cost of one let­ter and one word per usage. I hope they appre­ci­ate my efforts to help them.

Miscellaneous Sysadmin

I’m usu­ally the chief sysad­min in the fam­ily for the things like the print­er and the Win­dows boxes. In the interests of mak­ing it easi­er for myself in the future and hope­fully oth­ers, here are a couple of things I fixed this week.

For some reas­on the print­er, an old but still very pro­duct­ive HP Col­or Laser­jet 4550 that cost a hor­rendous amount when we first bought it back in 1998 or there­abouts, star­ted hav­ing con­nip­tions when we wanted to print out files. Mostly it blew up on Open­Of­fice or Microsoft Word doc­u­ments. The error was 49.4C04 Ser­vice Error. Pok­ing around on the web revealed a bunch of com­pletely use­less information:

Turn the com­puter off, wait a minute, turn it back on, this only ever hap­pens once and reboot­ing the print­er solves the problem
Wrong! The next thing I prin­ted caused one line of wing­dings to be prin­ted per page for many pages des­pite press­ing the can­cel but­ton; turn­ing the power off res­ul­ted only in paper jams and the same error message.
Caused by a defect­ive net­work card; replace
Not in this case; it’s a par­al­lel (LPT1) con­nec­tion dir­ectly into the net­worked PC
Caused by third-party memory; take it out
Again, not in this case since I nev­er bothered installing more memory

What did work was rein­stalling the drivers. Not the PCL 6 drivers that Win­dows tried to tell me to take, the PCL 5 drivers. Those PCL 5 drivers actu­ally work on our sys­tem, unlike the PCL 6 drivers.

The oth­er prob­lem that I found the solu­tion to was the size of the Norton Pro­tec­ted Recycle Bin. I installed this some years ago, have nev­er used it, and found that it kept grow­ing. And grow­ing. And would­n’t let itself be cleaned up, no mat­ter how often I told it to purge itself. So I unin­stalled and then tried to delete the recycler/nprotect dir­ect­ory files. No dice. The Norton web­site sug­ges­tion did­n’t work either (sounds weird, but it’s true); what did work was the sug­ges­tion I found online: rmdir /s \\?\C:\RECYCLER\NPROTECT. I sus­pect the Norton recycle bin will not be rein­stalled on my system.

Sun and OpenID

I’ve been heads-down on a pro­ject which was just announced (though not yet up and run­ning, so I’m still work­ing hard with the rest of the team on final details) about Sun put­ting up an Open­ID IdP (iden­tity pro­vider). The idea is that this IdP will veri­fy that the per­son using an Open­ID of the form http://openid.sun.com/username is a Sun employ­ee. Everything else is self-asser­ted, so people can use pseud­onyms and non-Sun email addresses, but they will be a Sun employ­ee. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens and how we can use it, once it’s live. That info will be pos­ted to developers.sun.com/identity as soon as the IdP is up and running.

I’ll be post­ing some tech­nic­al details of what I’ve been doing, and some tips and tricks to help someone else take the OpenSSO code and cus­tom­ize it; oth­ers on the team will be blog­ging about their pieces. 

It’s been a fun pro­ject and it will be even more fun see­ing what people do with it. We’re using the tag sun­open­id, or you can fol­low along on Plan­et Iden­tity.

Debian 4 and PPP

Yes­ter­day the latest release (4.0) of Debi­an came out. I decided to be big and brave and upgrade imme­di­ately; I’ve nev­er had any prob­lems with upgrad­ing Debi­an before and did­n’t expect to now. It took forever to down­load, ages to install (with me keep­ing all the old con­fig files as I always do). And then, at the end, our inter­net con­nec­tion was dead. Our inter­net con­nec­tion is via PPP, which was tricky to set up, so it seemed best to tackle the prob­lem in the morn­ing rather than risk mak­ing things worse.

This morn­ing I found that the ppp script in the /etc/init.d dir­ect­ory was­n’t there, but a #ppp# script was, with the right con­tent. So I renamed the file back to ppp, checked the backups to put the right sym­links into the vari­ous /etc/rx.d dir­ect­or­ies, and rebooted. Voila! An inter­net con­nec­tion. Now I just have to fig­ure out why apache2 isn’t run­ning. [Update: because it was upgraded to ver­sion 2.2 and the authen­tic­a­tion con­fig file syn­tax was changed, that’s why.]

I have no idea wheth­er the PPP prob­lem came from the dis­tri­bu­tion, or some­thing odd in my con­fig­ur­a­tion (although I’ve done full dist-upgrades before with no prob­lems). I did a hunt on the Debi­an wiki and found that Debi­an has added more PPPoE sup­port recently, so maybe there was a clash in there some­how. I’m glad I was para­noid enough to make backups of the /etc dir­ect­ory to com­pare with. At some stage I guess I should fig­ure out wheth­er to replace the cur­rent con­fig­ur­a­tion with the new Debi­an sys­tem, although I don’t like muck­ing about too much with things that actu­ally work, espe­cially when it comes to some­thing as vital as being able to con­nect to the Net. 

Bad Behavior

I’ve star­ted using the Bad Behavior/Bad Beha­viour plu­gin for Word­Press, which is meant to cut down on the num­ber of spam­bots that attempt to access my site. In the­ory it should­n’t block any real vis­it­ors, although this has been known to hap­pen, so if you notice any prob­lems (e.g., can­’t get to my blog from a feed, or from a link or search), please let me know. The plu­gin has been installed a week and nobody’s repor­ted any prob­lems so far. It works nicely with Spam Karma, the spam block­er I use.

I can recom­mend this plu­gin based on my exper­i­ence so far; I’ve noticed the amount of spam that I get is much less, which means that I will be able to check the Spam Karma logs for any real com­ments that were inad­vert­ently caught. If you’re plagued by spam bots on your blog and you have some con­trol over the envir­on­ment, it might be worth try­ing out.