Recent Posts by Tim Melander

Introduction Implementing SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) seems to be a popular topic. I wrote a 4 part series on SSSD that covers things such as the architecture, LDAP requirements, installation step-by-step guidelines, and troubleshooting tips along with a specific article on implementing SSSD with Active Directory using Kerberos — Using SSSD with Kerberos and Active Directory to Terminal into an OCI Linux Machine. However, it seems with each flavor of LDAP there are...

Introduction Imagine a Magician that can read your mind and suddenly pulls a secret out of your head you never told them. This is kind of what I am going show how to do, but using OCI magic. Take the following use case. A program running on a compute instance needs to access an external service. To access the external service the program needs a username and password. In point 2 above the username is not necessarily a secret, but the password is. One option is too hard code the...

In Part 1, About Desktop SSO using Azure AD, IDCS, and the App Gateway, I covered a high-level explanation on how this solution works including important decisions needed to deploy the App Gateway.  If you have not read Part 1, please do so before continuing with this article.   In Part 2 I provide concise steps on how to implement the solution, so let’s cut out the small talk and jump into it because there is a lot to cover.  STEP 1 – Oracle App Gateway – Download, Deploy,...

This article is part 1 of 2 that will explain how using Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Oracle IDCS, and the Oracle App Gateway can be used together to seamlessly access a protected HTTP resource using your Microsoft desktop login without being prompted to enter your username or password.  As a bonus, the App Gateway can be configured to pass data downstream in HTTP headers to the protected web application.  In fact, what makes this solution even more interesting...

If you have never heard of Postman, please see the official Get Started with Postman -  https://learning.postman.com/getting-started/ or my Part 1: Automate getting an Identity Cloud Service Access Token in Postman -  https://www.ateam-oracle.com/part-1-automate-getting-an-idcs-access-token-in-postman.  If you are familiar with Postman, you may have run into situations where hundreds or even thousands of records are returned from a single RESTful API call, but run into a...

This article covers an unpublished feature in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, at least at this time, to configure an access rule in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) to immediately redirect a browser to a specific URI when accessing another URI.  For example, someone goes to https://www.acme.com/help which could immediately redirect the browser to https://www.acme.com/portal/support.html.  I know, you are probably thinking there are a number ways to accomplish this feat, and...

Johannes Murmann wrote a great blog Integrating APEX with Oracle Identity Cloud Service, but this integration is for APEX running on-premises.  Fast forward, APEX has moved to the cloud like many other things, so I thought I should write an article on how to integrate the cloud version of APEX with Oracle Identity Cloud Service.  The integration is quite different as it uses the OpenID Connect protocol, and should be possible with any APEX cloud application.  As a bonus you...

Running Oracle Infrastructure Cloud database services on Bare Metal, VM, or ExaData is really great.  From the console you spin up a new database by selecting your shape, answer some questions, and instant database.  A lot of niceties are there to take care of things that normally has to do be done manually.  Then suddenly, in my case, my Oracle Access Manager WebLogic instance, which was using a cloud database to store data, failed to start.  The WebLogic logs output looked...

I recently created an instance, but when I tried to ssh to it I got the following error; what!?      tmelander$  Permission denied (publickey,gssapi-keyex,gssapi-with-mic) As part of the instance creation I went ahead and selected a public ssh key, and I may have used the incorrect public key or something else.  My bad. Regardless of what happen I was denied from logging into the instance.  If you google the error it could be a number of problems including incorrect permissions...