The Road to Oracle Adaptive Access Manager : Day 1

Posted by Topper on 10/5/2007
Posted in: Identity Management, Oracle, Oracle Adaptive Access Manger (OAAM). 3 comments

As a lot of people know, much of my last year has been spending time away from my portal / BI beginnings and spending more time in the Identity Management space. This year at Oracle World, I’ll be presenting on one of Oracle’s new IdM products Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM). This product was an acquisition from an Indian company by the name of Bharosa, the Hindi word for trust. It really is a nice product, providing real time risk assessment for every user of your system, and provides authentication mechanisms, as strong as, or stronger than those expensive tokens everyone has. I think I’d got over a dozen at home from various clients who gave me one “just in case.” Those little buggers aren’t cheap. Anyways, over the next few days I’ll be digging into the new product. Going through the installation and configuration, running it against different applications and profiles and reporting back on what I find.

I really do like this product and its simplicity of deployment. Its nice to find something “simple” in the Oracle stack(s) to play with. Stay tuned.

Leave it to Dan to spill the beans…side project in Alpha

Posted by Topper on 9/5/2007
Posted in: BI Server, BIEE, Business Intelligence, Data Integrator, Discoverer, General, Identity Management, Oracle, Portal, VMWare. Leave a Comment

Well, as many of you know, Dan Norris and I used to work together at ITC. He decided to go join some company known for handing out mints that tend to appear in peculiar places. In his post today he linked to the new site I’ve been working on. It’s obviously not live, but I linked in the blog section tonight. I still have some work to do on the templates in both the blog and wiki sections, some organization of the wiki, a couple entries in the FAQ, and a digg style rating system for users. I’ve worked out all my kinks with Amazon’s S3 service for the torrent downloads, now I’m in the process of uploading the initial VMs.

The first ones to be released will be a generic Oracle Enterprise Linux Update 5 VM with all the pre-configuration completed for database and application server installs. Next up will be a Portal 10.1.4 / BI 10.1.2.2.0 vm, an 11g database vm, and then hopefully Dan’s RAC vms.  The IdM VMs will come after that.  I’ve also had offers from Mark and John @ Rittmanmead.com for some of their BI and Data Warehousing VMs, hopefully I can catch up with them for dinner before the BIWA summit.

I’ve been busy with a whole bunch of client stuff lately, when Dan left ITC he also left me with a pretty healthy pipeline to deliver to, and I had already been booked for a client through the end of the year. (BTW, any Fusion Middleware guys need a job?) Needless to say, I’ve been a little busy lately and the horrible hotel upload speeds haven’t helped the situation in pushing things to Amazon.

So for now, go ahead, start using it. Tell me whats good, whats bad, what works, what doesn’t work, and I’ll do my best to keep on top of things. The OracleVMs.com project forum (http://www.oraclevms.com/forums/project.php?projectid=8) is the best place to log bugs, issues and feature requests. Feel free to start putting them there and I’ll slot them into the release cycle.

Oracle World Community Disappointment

Posted by Topper on 8/20/2007
Posted in: General. 3 comments

Is anyone else disappointed that there is a two way password hash for the Oracle Community from Leveragesoft (http://oracleopenworldconnect07.leveragesoftware.com)? I would tend to bet that there is actually no hash at all and its just plain text in a database somewhere.

It kills me how many companies still run the risk of plain text passwords in the database.  How many times have you had your credit card company read you your personalized pin back to you.  That should never happen, they should have to put it into an application and it matches the one was hash in the database or LDAP server.  I’d be happy to help them encryption or federation or any of the billions of solutions to the problem.

BTW- Whatever Dan Norris posts on this, it was my point first that brought this up.

Where have all the developers gone?

Posted by Topper on 8/9/2007
Posted in: BI Server, BIEE, Business Intelligence, Data Integrator, Discoverer, Identity Management, MapViewer / GIS, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Portal, Technology. 3 comments

In the IOUG Fusion Task Force meeting this week, we were discussing what could be provided to build a better community around the Fusion Middleware world and it’s ever growing list of products and acquisitions. A lot of us are classic Oracle guys that have been doing Java, ADF, App Server, Portal, Discoverer, etc. since its first release. We’ve always known the standard Oracle Metalink, Forums, and ListServs for Oracle help when we need it. Now with so many acquisitions it’s getting incredibly hard to catch up and the communities for many of the new products don’t exist.

One of the big questions that came up was where have all the developers gone. For some reason the term “The Lost Developers” popped into my head, which of course popped the bad 80’s movie “The Lost Boys,” and in turn this bad graphic. (Trust me you don’t want to try and understand whats in my head)

The Lost Oracle Developers

But in all seriousness, where did everyone go. I know a lot of the people went to start their own independent consulting shops, some stayed with Oracle, but what about the rest of the world? What about all the customers and other implementation partners? I went through, looked at the acquisition list, and couldn’t find user groups or message boards for many of them. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places or haven’t been taught the secret handshake yet, but here is the list I came up with:

Agile: Nothing
AppForge: Palm and Windows Media Local User Groups, nothing centralized
Bharosa: Nothing
Tangosol: LCUG (http://wiki.tangosol.com/display/LCUG/Home)
HotSip: Nothing
Siebel (Analytics): ITtoolbox Group (http://siebel.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/siebel-analytics-l)
SigmaDynamics: Nothing
Sleepycat: Nabble Forums (http://www.nabble.com/Berkeley-DB-f2899.html)
Stellent: Stellentforums.com and regional user groups
Context Media: Nothing
Oblix: Nothing
Octet String: Nothing
Thor Technologies: Nothing
TimesTen: Nothing
TripleHop: Nothing

Yes there are the Oracle boards, but many of them aren’t trolled by the experts of the acquired companies yet. So what happened? Where did everyone go? Right now I’m working on building a lot of pre-built virtual machines for my side project (thanks again for the people volunteering to help), but on the newer components I’m having to learn a ton as I go and it would be helpful to bounce ideas / questions off of people who have already been there and done that. I’m sure a lot of them are having the same problems now trying to deploy on to the Fusion Middleware stack.

So here it is, an open invite to come out of the corners and reveal yourselves. Where is everyone hiding? How can we build a better collaborative Oracle development world? I would love to hear people’s feedback. Maybe we need a myspace or facebook for Oracle people? I’m only half joking here, there sure are enough of us to keep it busy. What features would make it a kick ass collaboration environment? Forums? Wiki? Torrents? Instant Messaging? Desktop Sharing? Blogs Provider? Maybe just an Aggregator? Rent a VM development environments? Calendaring? Mapping? Presence? Ok, enough web 2.0 buzz words (crap, there was another one).

Call me, email me, IM me, post comments here, I just want to figure out how to make it easier on all of us.

The 2 Minute Job That Always Takes Me Too Long

Posted by Topper on 8/5/2007
Posted in: General, Oracle, Portal, Technology. Leave a Comment

I’m just going to post this up here because this is something I do all the time and for some reason it will never stick in my head. The idea is that I have a server root that I want to forward to another URL with mod_rewrite. Yeah, I know, I could just write it in mod_alias or a quick meta tag or JavaScript or whatever, but I live the clean mod_rewrite solution that I can bake right into a httpd.conf or .htaccess file. So here is it, whenever you want to forward something like: http:///www.mywebsite.com to http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal here it is:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mywebsite.com/pls/portal [R,L]

OK, enough, done…night.

PS- As you can tell I’m a bit frustrated with myself over this one. It’s only about the 100th time I’ve done something like this and I can never remember the syntax.

Game back on!!

Posted by Topper on 8/5/2007
Posted in: Oracle, Technology, VMWare. 4 comments

As some of you know, I was working on a side project a while ago to provide pre-built Oracle virtual machines and distribute them via torrents over the net. I talked a little bit about it back here. Well some people got wind of it and warned me that I would face problems with the Oracle licensing and it would be best if I didn’t move forward. Luckily, the Oracle licensing has been changed and I should be able to move forward. Also, Amazon’s S3 service is now providing torrent based seeding for files. Somehow their bandwidth bills are a lot less than mine (I guess when you buy in bulk you have quite the cost savings 😉 )

Thanks to the people that helped out the first time beta testing and then getting disappointed when I didn’t actually launch the thing. I promise this time will be different, if anyone wants to help out let me know. I’m geeked about this again!!!

Airlines and Oracle World

Posted by Topper on 6/30/2007
Posted in: Identity Management, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory, Personal. Leave a Comment

After an eventful week in Seattle, I was supposed to take the red eye back to DC for the weekend.  The flight was supposed to leave at 11:30 pm, well its 1 am now and I’m still an hour from take off.  Which means its 5am in back home time.  I think all the airlines have gone to crap in the last 6 months, I can’t remember the las time I had a flight that went off without an issue.  Hopefully I make it home and can sleep off the rest of the morning, after the week I had lord knows I need it.

On a good note I got an email from my good friends at IOUG that they’ve selected my “Oracle Identity Management: The Total Identity Solution” presentation for Oracle World this year! Woo hoo!!! It’ll be my first time presenting at Oracle World, with the BI CAB meeting and Regional Directors Meeting its already shaping up to be a busy conference.  We’ve been thinking of doing “Ask the experts session” at the conference giving time for people to come by the booth and ask our top people just about anything they want.  Discuss a problem they have, demo a cool project we’re working on, or just shoot the … well you know.  We’ll see, I think it could be a fun idea and give me a chance to meet some really cool people.

Just a quick update…

Posted by Topper on 6/12/2007
Posted in: General, Identity Management, Oracle, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Virtual Directory. 1 comment

Wow, just wow has its been incredibly busy lately.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be bouncing coast to coast every weekend.  This week I’m at Redwood Shores working with the new 11g FMW Beta.  I seriously underestimated the size of this release, just about everything is getting turned on its head for the better.  Thats about all I can say about it… 😉

I got word on Friday that my info has finally been added to the list of Oracle Regional Directors (http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/ofm_directors/index.html#Topper).  I feel honored to be part of the group and can’t wait to start fulfilling all the requirements around it.

Next week I’m in Daytona for the Kaleidescope Conference speaking on IDM, AJAX and WS-Security.  These are the same presentations I did at Collaborate last month and got some decent reviews (also the same ones posted on this site if you can’t make it to the conference).  On a side note, in the spirit of Daytona Dan Norris and myself are planning on renting motorcycles one of the nights we are there.  If anyone else wants to join in the fun let me know, I think the cost for the day was between $100 – $150.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about starting a website that would link technical people together.  There are a lot of great traveling consultants that are in a different city every week with a lot of Oracle product knowledge that you might not even know are working at the place next door.  Does anyone think building a site around linking technical people up for dinner in an area would be a good idea?  It would be something along with the lines of LinkedIn and It’s Just Lunch.  I’m just thinking out loud, its been something thats been in the back of my head for a while and keeps popping up as I’ve been flying around lately.

Blank VMware Guest on Server When Moving to Linux from Windows?

Posted by Topper on 4/29/2007
Posted in: General, Technology, VMWare. 7 comments

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about this lately, so I figured I’d write a quicky on how to fix this problem.

Problem Behavior:
A virtual machine was built in VMware Workstation on Microsoft Windows.  The person then FTP’d the machine to a Linux based VMware Server instance so that the image could be run in a central location.  After logging into the VMware Console for the server box, they boot the newly transferred virtual machine, but there is nothing on the interface.  The box boots fine, they can see it come up on the network, the MUI shows the box up and running and serving requests but each time the machine is connected to through the console it just displays a blank screen.
Solution:
The problem comes with permissions error on the Linux OS.  In order to see the machine through the console the vmx file must be executable for the user you’re starting it as.  The machine has no problem being bootable because it is readable, but in order to view it it must also be executable.

How to fix it:
Log into your Linux based VMware Server machine and find the directory where the virtual machine you are starting is located at.  Find the .vmx file and chmod it so that it’s executable i.e. chmod 755 myvm.vmx

Thats it.  Reboot the machine, reconnect through the VMware Console and you’re good to go.  This one stumped me for a while the fix time I came across it.