It’s been a while since my last blog entry so I thought I'd post get back into the swing of things with a posting on the topics that have been occupying me over the last few months.
- Federated Single Sign On - with and without TFIM
Over the last 6 to 9 months I've been getting more involved with Federation, specifically within the context of Identity Management and Single Sign On. I've been interested in this area for some time now, mostly because of the Identity Management challenges it can solve, as well as its ability to knit together applications that have a requirement to interoperate regardless of their geographic or DNS location.
Since gaining my 'IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager v6.1 deployment professional' certification in June'10 I've tried to increase the breadth of my understanding in this area and learn about the other complementary technologies and standards. This has given me the opportunity to study XACML (externalised application authorisation processing), OAUTH, Federated Provisioning and Cloud application integration (e.g. GoogleApps, Force.com, Zoho). The culmination of all this study generated a wish to create my own Federated Identity Provider, which would be a great development and learning tool. To build this Identity Provider I chose to use the OpenSAML framework.
This is one area about which I will be adding blog entries in the coming weeks as the SAML standard alone is quite rich and I've already learnt a great deal. Hopefully this will all be of interest to anyone getting into the area of Federation and/or the OpenSAML framework.
- Setting up custom ITIM workflows and ITDI adapters
As part of my role as a security consultant for Pirean, I am currently working on a very large identity management deployment, which involves ITIM. As you'd expect, a single product can never cater for every requirement, so where there have been gaps in the product I have needed to design and build several customised components. Where I can, I'll be posting any useful details on these, including those that I've already built.
- Setting up a network based music system at home and adopting HD audio
A couple of years ago I invested in a Network Attached Storage drive (a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo if you're curious), which I used to store all my photos (i.e. wedding) documents and music files. After a while I pulled out the default western digital 500 GB disk and replaced it with a pair of 1.5TB Samsung F2 eco drives, which the NAS allowed me to setup as a mirrored pair. The result of all this was that I now had around 1.4TB of disk space that would survive any single disk failure. With this in hand I took on the task of centralising and (yawn) cataloguing my entire music collection. This led me to question:
- how could listen to my music in the easiest and most portable manner that allowed me to avoid having to turn on my 'generic mp3 music player'
- Was I getting the best audio quality from my music collection
Again in the coming weeks I hope to add some posts on the setup I've created at home and also try and give some useful pointers to help out anyone who may be thinking of doing something similar in future
- DLNA and 3D TV
Finally, in a similar vein to the previous point, I've been interested for some time about if and how it could be possible to digitise, and therefore remove the need for, any physical media in one's life i.e. no more CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays or Vinyl. Using my NAS drive, a PS3 and a Samsung LED TV I've created what I think it quite a nifty system that attempts to realise the aspirations of the Digital Lifestyle Network Alliance (DLNA). As an extension to this I've recently taken ownership of a Samsung LED 3D TV (ue40c8000 for those that are curious) which I'm only now getting used to. As before, I intend to add posts around the DLNA setup I have at home, my experience with 3DTV and any pointers/lessons I've picked up on the way.
Quite a lot there as you can see, which now makes me wonder why I didn't start this earlier?Now..... where to start?
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