Atlassian Crowd and Gitlab

As you may be already aware, I am hacking gitlab and am currently trying to implement an identity management solution along with gitlab. The software that I tried including (rubycas, simpleid) all had the inherent capability of Single Sign On (SSO) however it lacked the finely grained authorization I was looking for.

So far here are some more I have isolated for this task. Some of them are:

1. JOSSO
2. freeIPA

However, I decided to give Atlassian Crowd before these Open Source alternatives. It apparently provides everything my organisation needs and some of it's competitors include:

• Oracle Enterprise Single Sign On
• IBM Security Identity Manager

For both of the above solutions I found no demo or trial was available. However, I managed integrating Crowd into gitlab and it was pretty basic stuff. Here's what you need to do:

Setup gitlab openid authentication with simpleid

Gitlab is a wonderful new tool that allows one to host projects just like we do on github. The basic difference is that github has public projects as it's default setting and gitlab has private!

What I was about to do was to integrate OpenID authentication mechanism so I needed a OpenID server for that. I used a fairly simple OpenID server, SimpleID. The name says it all!

Gitlab version 6.3.0 does not support openID authentication out of the box. Here are the necessary hacks required to get it running. I got it running on a centos 6.3 box.

[OFF] Wake me up when september ends

I am sure this song is familiar to you. In fact, today being the last day of September, I decided to try out a feature of Blogger. Scheduling posts. So this post is scheduled to be posted exactly at 12.01 AM, 1st October, 2013. Just when September ends this year.

Billie Joe Armstrong is 41. It has been a while when his father passed away. It has been a long time since he had holed himself up in his room and told his mum that he was busy, and to "Wake him up when September Ends".

Little did he know, this would become an anthem of the generation. I love the song, but it has nothing to do with him, honestly! I love the song because the song is a marvellous celebration of beauty, sadness, life and death. It is one of those things we know of, but do not have a reason. It is like believing that there is someone to guide us at all times, and that someone has not left us. That someone will never leave us. We will all wake up, when September ends.

Let us grieve now, for we have hope. To resurrect ourselves, to live the amazing life circus. To live what our forefathers have dreamt of. We surely can dedicate a month for that, can't we?

Billie Joe Armstrong is 41. Yes. Reflecting on that makes me feel so old. I was brought up in this age of the internet, mobile phones, WhatsApp, WhatsNot, etc. I wonder what happened to me?

There is a song by a Bangaldeshi singer, "Topu", "Bhalobashi", that has the lines-

Eto bhebe ki hobe?
Bhebe ke koreche ki kobe?
Bhabchi na ar, ja hobar hbe.

Translated that means -

What will pass by so much thinking?
Who ever did something by just thinking?
I am not thinking any more, what is supposed to, will happen.

Another month has passed, or rather, will pass when this is posted. I think I will side with Topu.

Billie Joe Armstrong is 41. For those who wonder if he was some relative of Niel Armstrong, the first man on the moon, I say, yes he was. He made us all go to the moon. I mean, rock meant Green Day once upon a time in our life (with out any disrespect to Linkin Park or all other amazing ones) and in probably many other peoples lives as well. What this song reeks of is utter respect.

So yes, not further diverging from the topic. Like I said, this post was meant to test a feature of Blogger. Lets see if this will work.

Logstash undocumented

So I was playing around with logstash for a few days and it frustrated me that their documentation was awful. These guys really need to get someone to write more of the usability of the utility. For those who are not aware of this awesome tool, logstash, please do check out it's homepage. It is used for analysis of log files (in servers in most cases). So what is does is essentially 3 steps:

1. Collects logs by monitoring files or sockets, executing commands, etc. It has a host of input plugins, check out the docs page for a very sparse view.
2. Apply filters on the inputs, modify the way the input looks like eventually.
3. Output filters, dump the data to a socket, webapp, queues, etc. 

Logstash is generally used in cases of elastic search (e.g. kibana) that shows up neat graphs and searching can done in this data as well.

So in my particular case what I was trying to do was send data across to graphite, which just shows the data in a neat graph.

[OFF] The Old Bearded Barber

I have meaning to write about this seemingly common incident that happened last weekend for a long time. So finally, I see I have been able to gather wits together.

It was an idle Saturday afternoon in Mumbai, contrary to what you might say, the place where I live is a rather calm and serene area with not an iota of chaos that one would normally associate with the city. I woke up at around 12.30 enjoying more than a night's sleep to my delight as Kavita Bai had  switched off the fan. If she hadn't done that, I was up to break the Guiness Records for sleeping for sure!

Now, the story is not only about me and my laziness, which on the contrary would make an amazing story as well! (I would creep you out with that later, sometime) The story is of an old bearded barber. Now you would say, what is so special about an old bearded barber? Nothing. Just the way I looked at that entire encounter of around 25 minutes maybe.

How many websites in the world?

So here I was sitting on my desk at work wondering how may websites are there in the world. The guy next to my cubicle announced Google had 8 billion websites indexed in it's servers! So I had to delve in and find out how many are there really.

So here's the number for today:  146,350,470

So, it was actually pretty easy to find the internet on the internet. So here are some cool links that have the relevant info.

[OFF] A random poem I wrote

Being a poet is what I suck best at, here's one of more of my absolute classics that will make you contemplate the meaning of life. Make you think twice before reading the utter crap that I write in the name of poetry. This one is supposed to be a romantic poem in case you feel it is a poem about potatoes (or rhinoceroses).

The Princess of Mystery

Tired is my mind,

Solace seems so distant.

I have tread on a long road,

Just to be closer.

Timeout while testing with centos httpd (solved)

Hello all,

A tech post after a long time! So, here I was in my desk trying to understand how HTTP headers work. So I did a telnet to my CentOS VM's httpd (apache web server) and just typing

GET / HTTP/1.1

and just when I was in the next line, the connection got terminated. Annoying! Just then my mentor, told me that there were apache flags for that stuff. It looked like this

RequestReadTimeout header=50-80,minrate=1
RequestReadTimeout body=50,minrate=1

So I added that stuff to the "httpd.conf" file and it was supposed to work. Boom! It gives me an error saying the directive was not recognized. 

[OFF] Love in the times of rains

It's been such a rainy morning. No sign of the sun anywhere on the sky. Clouds all around threatening to unleash their watery fury at any time they wish. It has been a time when the trees enjoy merrily. The earth can bathe in the purest form of water Nature can give.

It's been watter-logged here near my house. The late morning rains accompanied by a powerful wind woke me up today. The wind was cold. It touched my soul and wanted me to love. It wanted me to love the rains. I wonder, why does the rain want my love, when it has so many lovers already? So many poets line up expressing their love to this wonderful outburst of Nature! Probably, I am the person she chose to love among all them people. Probably, I am the one, the clouds chose to offer their unbridled love!

Nah, too mushy.

[Chords] Adbhut Mughdhota by Anupam Roy

This is my first chord post on my blog. Anupam Roy's Adbhut Mughdhota / Advut Mughdota from his album Dwitiyo Purush.

Taken from the man his facebook page!


Enjoy!

G                        Bm 
Kato kato din, kabyohin.
C                    G
Theke jaay, dimer shaaday.

Complain to TRAI

Hey folks!

Recently, my mobile phone service provider has been giving me a hard time. From automatic money laundering to service activations I had never requested, the mobile corporation provided me with lots of love. Now, being the unromantic person I am, I was left with the following options.

The Helpful Web

In the modern age, probably what we use more than MasterCard is the Internet! For everything else, there is Mastercard, remember?

Jokes apart, the internet is turning into a medium that can be used to virtually we can think of. One such aspect of the internet is e-shopping. I want to today, speak about my experiences of e-shopping, the awesomeness of it and the not-so-obvious bottlenecks.

Consider a website like paytm.com, where we can recharge our mobile phones, book bus tickets, prepay DTH and what not! Flipkart.com is another site which offers facilities to buy stuff online and have them delivered to your home, in most cases, at no extra cost. Florist.com is a website that delivers flowers right down to your crush's house!