As mentioned earlier I was going to replace thiss-mdq with pyFF for my SAML federation metadata query service. Comparison thiss-mdq / pyFF On its project site thiss-mdq describes itself as The thiss-mdq is a minimal implementation of MDQ that only supports JSON data. while pyFF considers itself “a SAML metadata aggregator written in python”. Both […]
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SAML discovery service
Federated services If you want to provide web bases services in a federated (SAML) environment, you’ll need a way for your users to select their home institution in order to log into the service using their local credentials. That service is called discovery service. What’s that discovery service doing? So what happens if a user […]
There Multiple SPs on same apache vhost By default the helper scripts mentioned above use some default values like file names and local hostname. So in case you need multiple SPs within a single apache web service, we’ll need to generate key pairs and metadata for each of them and use more specific settings for […]
I once started protecting web sites using mod_auth_mellon. Back then it seemed much easier to implement it that way, however shibboleth / mod_shib is the default implementation and therefore seems to be the better choice on the long run. For a basic introduction have a look here. Existing mellon config In this example we’ll change […]
Some time ago I ran into trouble while installing debian packages (something went wrong and a few packages claimed to be installed – their corresponding files however didn’t make it to disk). While I was able to fix most of them from time to time I still got random errors that – after some investigation […]
…supporting AMD and Intel GPUs. If everything went fine, the output of ffmpeg should look something like this:
If you want to use GPU accelerated video encoding in Linux you’ll end up using ffmpeg (even if you may not know that it’s used underneath the software you’re running). While experimenting with a Nvidia card, I found myself struggling with the Nvidia documentation about how to build ffmpeg with CUDA support. Fix missing dependencies […]
A LLM (Large Language Model) is the basis for most current AI tools. Fortunately there are lots of open source models that can be run on your own hardware (if it is powerful enough). However I asked myself more than once: what is powerful enough? Hardware requirements While experimenting with LLMs one of the first […]
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Analyzing Ubuntu Initial Ramdisk
While investigating ZFS snapshot problems I was looking into Ubuntu 24.04 initial RAM disks (initrd/initramfs). So here’s what I found. Unpacking RAM disk Over the years many different ways to pack a RAM disk were used (things like cpio archives, squashfs, and so on). Since it has been a long time since I was forced […]
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ZFS snapshot problems
While experimenting with encrypted ZFS root file systems, I encountered some odd behavior concerning snapshots: I had created a separate /etc file system with snapshots. The listing of the snapshots shows up, however all snapshot directories were empty: However zfs reported, that the snapshots contain data, so I guess the snapshots are created, they’re just […]