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 […]
Category: Linux
Categories
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 […]
Categories
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 […]
Docker hub recently announced an upcoming request limit to their registry. So in order to reduce the amount of requests issued there, the idea of a caching proxy solution comes to mind. Possible solutions Fortunately there are some projects already working on that problem. However there are different approaches. Some of the projects I found […]
In my latest Ubuntu server installation I was aiming for a fully encrypted file system. In order to unlock the file system from remote this requires some extra work – here’s what I found: How does it work? The first obvious question is: If everything is encrypted, how can we even boot up a system? […]
In order to investigate a possible Ubuntu server installation on top of (encrypted) ZFS, I decided to first do this with the desktop version. Reason for that is simple: The desktop version of the installer contains an option to install on a root ZFS volume (guess what: the server version does not). So I started […]
Categories
ZFS feature upgrade
ZFS comes with quite a set of features. However when upgrading zfs, new features are not enabled by default for compatibility reasons. This may be reported by zpool status: In order to get more information about possible new features you can use zpool upgrade: You can add option -v to get more detailed information about […]