Is NetBeans Plugin Supported by SUN?

Good Question isn't it?

Answer:

Sun only officially supports the Netbeans plugin through standard support tickets and only if you have a support contract for Identity Manager.

The picture of a person whom I adore

Yes, it is Whitfield Diffie the inventor of the Public Key Cryptography.

AD Password Sync can be delayed

Read an article on Microsoft site on how to delay the password updates for a user specific amount of time. I am sure this would be useful for many of us at any time during our deployments.

Read on ...

Kindly leave your emailId

I get few tech queries. Most of them are posted as comments. When I want to get back to them, I do not have their mail id.

Thus kindly post your mail id.

Thanks a lot.

Tripit.com

A little bit out of the box, however I have been just told about an amazing tool provided by http://www.tripit.com.

Features:

1. Just send your trip itinerary to plans@tripit.com and it automatically creates your id with your email and sends you a password
2. It also parses your email and plans your calender accordingly.
   
3. Using the calender update URL you may synchronize your personal calenders.
4. Also when you expand your network by adding friends it shows where they are and to them, where you are.

Isnt this cool???

All the frequent travelers out there, register on http://www.tripit.com

SUN Identity Manager - A Tip

When a resource is created (ex: LDAP) you may test this. Enter the credentials to connect except the password. Amazingly you will find that the Test Connection succeeded. Now save it to have problems later :-)

So if there is a problem in retrieving data or something similar anytime, you better check your resource for password.

Thought it would help some.

Faking one's experience has become the practice of the Industry???

Pondering yesterday about what has everyone got for what they are, I was astonished by the fact that all the class toppers in my class are just doing good, however the average guys are doing much better. My engineering class toppers are just working for ordinary packages in good companies and the others are working for exemplary packages.

Faking one's experience has become a part and parcel of many IT professionals' lives. I can tell you a wonderful story.

Few of my intelligent and hardworking friends resorted to their masters after completing engineering. Remaining people who couldn't clear their exams or didnt get jobs were just roaming on roads with their parents money for almost two years. By the time these intelligents completed their Masters, these people who enjoyed their two years flaunted their resumes in the industry with an experience of two years and got better jobs. These foolish intelligent guys were obviously freshers and deserved less than them.

Moral: So you may have fun for two years after engineering; goto Goa, roam around with your girl friend and then finally struggle for six months to be in a better position.

Pointers:
Companies like Wipro, Infosys, Satyam, I mean name any big brand, there are atleast 30% of people joining them via lateral hiring with fake experiences. These people fake their experience their payslips and get a good pay and better grade than the ones who are genuine. These big companies which boast about background verifications do very little to stop it. If anyone has to say anything against my word, I can prove my statements.

Ethics have no place in the Indian IT industry today.

One another technology which has fallen prey to these fake guys is SAP. Every Tom D**k and Harry goes to some place in Hyderabad to get software installed for Rs.2000 i.e. a mere $50 on their machines and get courses learnt for a mere Rs. 10000 i.e ($250) and thats it once done, these people call themselves a 3 yr experienced and get paid almost 100 times their SAP tution fee.

Is this the only way to go ahead? If so, one can enjoy his school, college and everything, finally buy couple of certificates and one PC with printers to print his fake resume and submit it. Thats it he would have a better situation than the guy who slogged all his life?

I dont remember the ending of the story by SomerSet Maugham but today atleast the grasshopper wins. Will there be some change in this pattern?

Final word, I think even the NASSCOM is sleeping.

Login.jsp redirects to Configure: Import Exchange File

Product: Sun Identity Manager

You have hit the idm admin URL and you are redirected to the Configure: Import exchange file page? Did this ever happen to you? A snapshot of that looks like this.

Did you observe the logged in as field? Yes this is something funny that can happen to you.

Reason: Your IdM is unable to locate the database, if someone has removed your database or something of the same sort has happened then you see this page.

Solutions:

1. Recover your database

2. If its ok to have a fresh identity manager i.e. if you lose nothing, then just import the init.xml from idm-installation-dir\sample\init.xml

Still hanging around with any version below 7?

Folks looks like the next version of Sun Identity Manager release is not too far. If you are still working with any version below 7? then you may wait to upgrade your skills, directly to ?????? Ahaaa ... wait for the release and the number.

Acquisitions Galore

The entire world believed that 2007 was the year for all major acquisitions and truly it was. However, it seems like 2008 has more in store. The year started with the two major acquisition announcements.

SUN Microsystems announcing its intent to acquire MySql

Sun has recently announced its intent to acquire MySql. Day after day SUN is becoming a complete shop, high performing servers to wonderful softwares. One thing to wait and watch would be how would they bundle MySql? Currently SUN already provides PostGRE Sql with its OS.

The best online information regarding the same would be Jonathan's Blog

Oracle's acquistion of BEA

Oracle has announced that it is acquiring BEA systems. Its paying $21/share value which is 25% more than the current value, i.e. 16th January Closing price. This is another great move by Oracle.

We have to wait and see what else does 2008 has in store.

Sun Identity Manager is affected by multiple security vulnerabilities with varying impacts

Three Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities may allow local or remote unprivileged users the ability to execute unauthorized scripting code in a user's browser when that user clicks a link to Sun Java System Identity Manager. In addition, a further vulnerability may allow a local or remote unprivileged user to inject unauthorized HTML code into a user's browser when that user clicks a link to Sun Java System Identity Manager. Two additional vulnerabilities may allow a local or remote unprivileged user to redirect the browser to unintended remote sites or to inject frames containing data from unintended sites.

For more information

My Sojourn at the states

November 28th is when I came to St.Louis planning to complete an ongoing project. There were many issues without answers. And once I was at the client's place, only then I understood all what they did to bring up the issues. Kept resolving one by one to complete the LDAP ActiveSync Identity management project. Although not everything was complete I still had to move out of the place. One best thing that happened was the LUNCH at RUCHI, the Indian restaurant. Wow, it was an amazing lunch.

Then on Sunday, we have left to Salt Lake City, an amazing place expect for the climate. It was freezing for me. I have never ever experience what negative temperatures were like before here. I was walking on the roads when it was -6. Its killer cold for me. Lot of Indian restaurants around.

Finally after a two tough-cold weeks at Salt Lake City, I am moving to Austin tomorrow. Expecting to meet some old friends. Will update

NetBeans 6.0 Integrated Development Environment Ready for Action

I shouldn't be doing the talking here ... so .... click

Few Questions to ask when you are designing an Identity Management Project

Hope this helps for some. This is basic, I shall keep adding. Visit this blog for more.

• What resources do you have?
• What are your resource schema?
• How do you want your mapping from Identity manager to be done?
• What are the accountIds I get to access your resource?
• Does that accountid have the right privileges to access all the items the identity manager needs access to?
• If you are doing Active sync from LDAP do you have the changeLog enabled?
• Is the ID provided, access the changelog?
• How many object classes do you have in your LDAP?
• Should all of them be managed?
• How many object classes you have in AD?
• Do you know that only one object class can be managed from one resource instance in AD?
• What are the additional attributes you want to populate in Identity Manager?
• How do you create users on every resource?
• If you are following any non-generic process to populate users on your Authoritative source/sources then please let us know HOW?
• What is the password policy on each resource?
• What is the password policy you expect the Identity Manager to have?

Is your Identity Management Implementation complete?

I have question? Who exactly is implementing the complete Identity solution? My identity management experience is just 3 years, by December 12th. I have worked with various clients. I have not found even a single organization using the Identity management product (which ever they bought) to the fullest. I mean the provisioning capabilities of the product are not used properly.

And the major reason people state is, they are not clear about their organizational roles. How long? I mean it has been longtime organizations started having the need to implement IdM solutions and still no one's figured out how to make it complete? The sales pitch of many identity sales guys says, other than compliance one can achieve profits by limiting calls to the help desk, reduce the number of administrators managing resources and all such other stuff, but is it happening?

I have seen many orgs, asking us just to send an email to the admin rather than provisioning. The admin creates the user and says done to make the audit log. Thats it, the auditor is happy and so is the company. Is this what is Identity Management?

What is the way ahead for all these implementors and organizations? Investing this much on the solutions/products?

A different thought:
How about saying a discplined approach from the beginning of an organization would have avoided this mess? Security/Process these terms come in only after the mess has already happened. Recently I was talking to an ISO in a big company and he said first I need the process to be in and then we can think of security. Wow, dude are you into information security?

If an organization can have processes set from day one and follow them and be disciplined, things will be better.

Some hero from some workgroup creates a beautiful html page and says from today we can use this for some XYZ work. Its launced and the hero is rewarded. Later after 10 years when this page becomes critical and the creator has already left the organization without any documentation, pffffffhhhh then you know what happens.

So any new entreprenuers? Guys be cautious today to avoid huge unnecessary investments tomorrow.

SUN Identity Manager: Deserialization failed for xmlString

Did you ever see this error when accessing the repository objects via the BPE? Ok this was an error recently my friend got. I thought I should mention the reason so that someone who get it sometime can quickly refer.

What my colleague did?:
He imported the netbeans plugin for idm into netbeans and configured a project. When he was configuring the repository, he gave the existing repository as the one that needs to be used by netbeans. Thats it, NetBeans changed the serial numbers of few tables of the Identity manager repo. Thus this error.

Solution:
I think we need to do an LH SETREPO and things should be working.

Are you using the Metaview of SUN Identity Manager?

Are you? If your answer is a NO, then it is suggested that you better stick with it. This feature currently has few bugs, which are yet to be corrected in the SUN Identity Manager release 8.0. It really plays with your attributes in such a way, that you hardly have an idea of what is happening.

I was using this feature recently and only landed in horrible times. When I referred to my seniors at SUN, they said they never use it as it has problems.

So to my suggestion to all SUN IdM folks out there is ... do not use Metaview please.

MetaView of SIM vs MIIS

Metaview feature of Sun Identity Manager, I don't know how many of the Identity professionals use it. However I wanted to take you through the architecture of it. It would be great for people who know MIIS.

The features are ...

Identity Attributes:
This feature allows you to configure the incoming and outgoing attributes. You will be able to create a new attribute, choose whether it should be stored in the identity manager, choose its source and destinations (resource). This is a feature that is exactly available in MIIS. You can also set the precedence for the source, like you may choose the first source and then the next which would be able to populate this attribute, again a feature of MIIS.

Identity Events:
Have you been into the third tab of Microsoft Identity Integration Server, where you can configure the delete rule? Yes, its the same way here. You will be able to configure the events like DELETE, DISABLE, ENABLE etc. You need to create a new event type, specify a rule on how it should be recognized and then actions to be performed.

These features are very specific to active sync because that is what a Synchronization engine works for.

Recently I have been working with these features and every moment I was feeling the MIIS features.

Bulk Loading

This may look novice to experienced professionals.

Have you ever did a bulk load of users into Sun Identity Manager? The findings I have are ...

Every attribute that comes under the waveset should be represented in the global namespace and the other attributes should be addressed as accounts[RESOURCE].attrName.

ex:
command,user,global.firstname,global.lastname,password.password,password.confirmPassword,waveset.resources
create,henryea,Earl,Henry,P@ssw0rd,P@ssw0rd,AD

Hope this should be useful to someone.

Using "lh console" when your SUN Identity Manager Application is down

I have just encountered a different kind of a problem. I have set the trace parameters in my Sun Identity manager. I have configured it to trace few adapters and finally gave a large number for the file size. Restarted the server and it failed saying ...

java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "9999999999

So to correct this error I have got two options

1. Changing the System Configuration file using the lh console command

go to wshome\bin
Execute the following commands:
./lh console and press enter
You'll get to the configurator> prompt
Atthe promt, type
export -v c:\syscon.xml CONFIGURATION
now open the file c:\syscon.xml and scroll down till you find the required attribute to change.