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.