IdP
Have spent quite a bit of time trying to get a Shibboleth 2.0 IdP server up and running under Ubuntu 8.0.5 Server LTS. Not there yet but I think I’m getting close. This page has been particularly helpful:
Install Shibboleth 2.0 Identity Provider on Debian 4.0 (etch), Tomcat and Apache
IP changes
Campus networking asked this past week that we change the IP addresses for our many servers—pulling our machines into a contiguous range of addresses (to simplify firewall rule coding and so on). It has been quite an experience finding and fixing the many hacks installed over the years on various machines. You know, stuff like that time in 1998 you hard coded an IP address into a configuration file because DNS lookups seemed to be taking forever…
It’s also a chance to reflect again on how different each operating system seems to be when it comes to changing an existing IP address. Solaris 10 seems the easiest (at least when trying to make the change via an ssh login):
modify /etc/hosts
modify /etc/inet/ipnodes
reboot
The SuSE Linux box hosting this weblog was down for hours as the new IP assigned put it squarely in the “unreachable from outside Mason’s network” zone of the campus firewall. If you’re reading this (and you’re off campus), then our campus firewall administrators have corrected their planning lapse.
Weblog changes
It’s been nearly a month since the last post but I’ve come up with a nearly effortless way to foster the illusion that this is an active site. I’ve added the “recently bookmarked” section you see over on the right side panel. Now when I send a bookmark to del.icio.us (using Pukka), a WordPress plugin pulls it into the weblog. At some point in the near future I’ll fine tune things a bit further–only grabbing del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “inode” or something similar (to make sure no inappropriate or personal links end up here).