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Linux Microsoft Samba Ubuntu Windows

Samba domain controller: raising (all kinds of) level

While trying to get radius working with my Samba domain controller, I was looking for a way to get attributes like radiusTunnelPrivateGroupId into it. In the end the solution was something completely different, but anyhow: Here’s what I did to raise the domain level (and as it turns out the function and forest level) of […]

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Firewall Linux Network radius WIFI WPA2

Ubiquity WiFi with WPA2 Enterprise

Due to some hardware problems with my switches (cheap Chinese ones) I recently decided to switch my core home network to Ubiquity systems. Only 3 weeks later I had to realize that my old FritzBox had lost its 2.4 GHz WiFi (seems to be quite common and may obviously go unnoticed for a long time […]

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Docker IdP Linux python Shibboleth SingleSignOn SSO Virtualization

pyFF – federation metadata processing at its best

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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IdP Keycloak Linux SAML Shibboleth SingleSignOn SSO Ubuntu

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 […]

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Apache Encryption IdP Keycloak Linux SAML Shibboleth SingleSignOn SSO Webserver

Apache SAML authentication with mod_shib (part 2)

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 […]

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Apache Linux SAML Shibboleth SingleSignOn SSO Webserver

Migrate apache2 mod_auth_mellon to mod_shib

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 […]

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Debian Linux Ubuntu

Finding (and fixing) incompletely installed debian packages

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 […]

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Filesystem Kernel Linux RAM disk ZFS

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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Container Docker Encryption Linux Network Proxy Virtualization Webserver

Setting up a docker registry proxy

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 […]

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Linux OpenSSH SecureShell SSH

Remotely unlocking encrypted root file systems

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? […]