Saturday, October 10, 2009

Another Quirk with Tivoli Common Reporting...

Just thought I would mention this. The report package you download for Tivoli Common Reporting may produce an error like the following:

Error CTGTRD040E










To get around this I unzipped the report file and re-zipped it using WinRAR. For some reason TCR 1.1.1 has a problem with some zip files. Something about not liking directory names as zip file entries. Anyhow, WinRAR did the trick.

Can't find TAMeB Reports?

Just in case you are hunting and pecking for reports for TAMeB using Tivoli Common Reporting, I assume you've seen the documentation for auditing TAMeB. It's only 500+ pages. :-)

The basic idea is that you will first install Tivoli Common Reporting (integrated in the WebSphere Integrated System Console). Then you need to download the reports from the support web site. Why they don't simply include these with TAM is a mystery. Oh and good luck finding them by searching reports, or audit reports, etc.... If you search for "Operational Reports" you will find them. Go figure.

Anyhow the link to the reports:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=638&context=SSPREK&q1=operational+reports&uid=swg21303439&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

TDI 7 - Eclipse anyone?

So I think that most of us using TDI over the past few years can say mostly good things about the product. Personally it's one of my favorite tools in the Tivoli Security stack being largely a non-developer type I feel empowered when I make cool things work with it. However most people would also agree that the products implementation of Swing might be a bit off. Just weird stuff like if you have a pop up window and you hit the enter key you expect the OK button to depress. And sometimes resizing windows is a little weird. I've even had to close the tool kit and reopen it sometimes just to make things work.

All that is pretty much gone with the new TDI 7.0. Oh and I believe there is a fix pack out already. I'm just starting to play with this new version. It takes some getting used to if your not comfortable with eclipse, but I look forward to working with it.

BTW, there is a pretty cool tutorial out there you can check out:

http://sites.google.com/site/tdi7islive/

Nice job who ever took the time to do this!

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Risk - ignore, accept, mitigate, insure

Tivoli security professionals are pretty much in the Risk Mitigation business. Any organization who has any identity information in house on employees, customers, or partners will at some point address the risk of losing this information. And subsequently they will ask:

"What's the chance of losing that information?"
"What's the cost to us if that information gets lost?"
"What should we do about it?"

The answers are undoubtedly, ignore the risk, accept the risk, mitigate against that risk, or just buy some extra insurance.

Organizations large and small are thinking about how important it is to deprovision accounts that are no longer needed. Doing this via e-mail is not going to work well. This is one main reason Identity Management systems exist.

These latest security breaches illustrate the headaches organizations face when they fail to ensure that their former employees are removed from accessing their IT systems:

http://datalossdb.org/incidents/2152-unauthorized-access-by-a-former-employee-exposes-names-addresses-and-social-security-numbers-of-past-and-present-employees

And this one was even more brazen by an American Express employee. Holy crap $1 million. This guy had a good job watching over the systems that hold data for many of us. I'm not sure how you prove that a laptop which is reported stolen wasn't really stolen. This dude should go to jail for a long time.

http://www.kpho.com/money/19936013/detail.html

Why hire consultants?

I have always thought of myself as a consultant. Perhaps I'm just a people pleaser, not to the extreme that I'm compulsive or anything, but that I genuinely like to help others. I can recall the days when DOS 5 was a huge deal. I was networking computers using ArcNet, LANTastic and Novell 3. A 386 DX2/66 with 4MB of RAM was smoke'n fast.

I recall some of the best advice I got from a guy named John Posey (John if your still out there thanks for all your help). He said, "Chuck, run out and buy yourself a DOS book." The past mystery of my Commodore 64 seemed silly once I read that DOS book. It was clear to me then that if one could read, one could do this technology stuff. Oh how things have gotten so complicated.

So, why should you hire consultants?

1.) Well, look I understand all you geeks out there who are highly skilled can certainly figure all this stuff out yourself. Like I just said, if you can read, you'll get there eventually. But, the bottom line is there just isn't time for everyone to know everything. Take TIM, TAMeB, TFIM, TAM ESSO, TCIM, TSOM, and the rest of the Tivoli Security products. If you want to implement any one of these or some of them, you can certainly buy the software, read the manuals and go for it. The fact is though, it doesn't always work like the manual says. So, you may have to do it a few times until its right. And that's OK. But, businesses today are more concerned with ensuring that the technology is solving business needs. They are not necessarily interested in making you an expert at installing Tivoli software. That perhaps is better left to consultants.

2.) Good consultants are in this game because they like to help people. At least that's the experience I have seen with the colleagues I work with. And the objective is to enable customers to be self sufficient in steady state maintainability of the products and solutions.

3.) We really have seen many use cases, configurations and different applications of these software products so you can save a ton of time in the planning phases of your projects by using consultants.

4.) Consultants in the security business have a lot of friends doing the same thing which can help in getting the right skills on the job. Solutions using enterprise software like Tivoli will often require many different skills. There will rarely be one guy/gal who can do it all. Although I've worked with some amazingly bright people in this business, there are usually multiple people involved in average Identity Management projects. Utilizing a good consulting group will help you succeed. For Tivoli, an IBM Business Partner is key for a couple reasons:
a.) IBM Business Partners have unique relationships with IBM which helps to deliver solutions most cost effectively.
b.) IBM Business Partners can bring versatile project management skills to your project which may involve IBM and Non-IBM products and solutions
c.) IBM Business Partners can bring low cost resources into your project as well as subcontracted IBM resources which helps to drive down the cost of your project while maintaining a strong IBM presence in the success of the project
d.) IBM Business Partners have a vested interest in seeing the IBM solution succeed.

5.) Good consultants will pass on their experience and knowledge to you. I tend to share as much as I know because I believe in educating people, I will also learn some new things. Every good project should have some time dedicated to knowledge transfer, but even when that dedicated time is not there, you will still learn a lot from a good consultant.

6.) Consultants save you time and money in the long run. Lets face it, time is money. If a project is being managed properly, there will be some realistic goals and objectives. If the goal is say 6 months from now we will have xyz product installed and configured and you already have a full time job, then how likely will you meet that goal? Hire the consultant and get the job done.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Changing LDAP Suffix

Of course when building an LDAP it's best practice to choose wisely and carefully your LDAP structure to minimize any ugly rework later. This is a no brainer. But, I've been working on setting up a demo test system for TFIM. And, as I am not a web developer I'm going to use the demo apps that come with Tivoli Federated Identity Manager 6.1. But this Federation demo assumes that there are specific configurations done in your LDAP first.

Now, I already had a working TAMeB system with TDS and WAS, etc.... So I wanted to use what I had to minimize the work in setting up TFIM. I built another TAMeB environment to act as my partner site as well. Installing TFIM and creating the Federation domain was no problem. Even creating the Federation agreements and exporting both sides was straight forward. But when it came to configuring TAM for TFIM I ran into an unforeseen snag at the point where this program wants to configure for the demo apps:

tam:/opt/IBM/FIM/tools/tamcfg # java -jar ./tfimcfg.jar -action tamconfig -cfgfile /opt/pdweb/etc/webseald-default.conf

...
Press 1 for Next, 2 for Previous, 3 to Repeat, C to Cancel: 1
Perform configuration for demo application (y/n): y
Checking for DN cn=elain,o=identityprovider,dc=com.
FBTTAC062E Error checking for the DN cn=elain,o=identityprovider,dc=com in the user registry:
HPDMG0761W The entry referred to by the Distinguished Name (DN) must be a person entry.


You may need to create this registry entry manually or use the itfim-pre-install-tool.jar to create it for you.
Press 1 to Repeat, 2 for Previous, C to Cancel:

So, I really didn't consider that the demo apps for TFIM would be relying on specific users to exist in TAM/LDAP and even a specific LDAP structure. This is sort of lame. I need these demo apps for my testing, yet I'm forced to have a specific set of users and LDAP design. Annoying.

I set to work making the necessary changes to my LDAP, however one problem was that my suffix was already dc=ca,dc=com and the LDAP will not allow me to create a new object for the demo "o=identityprovider,dc=com". This means I need a new suffix at dc=com which the LDAP will not allow since a suffix already exists containing dc=com. No worries, I figure I'll just do a db2ldif and export my users and groups, etc... (TAM is using these already), then blow out the LDAP, delete the existing suffix and create a new one "dc=com", then just add the "dc=ca" domain under the suffix and finally do a ldif2db.

This all worked right up until I realized that the ACLs do not go back into the LDAP. The db2ldif utility will capture the ACLs and they will be right there in your LDIF file, but for some reason when you use the ldif2db these ACLs do not go back into the LDAP. Additionally I tried a bulkload with the -A and still no ACLs. I know that I must be missing something. Rather than spend a lot of time troubleshooting this I ended up configuring the ACLs for TAM manually on my "dc=com" object so that I could get back to business. If anyone knows what I may have missed, feel free to let me know.

Regards

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Which product version do you have?

The Tivoli security products contain several components and middleware making it sometimes difficult to know exactly what versions and fix packs you are at for all of the pieces. Also, you may only need this information once in a while maybe for troubleshooting a problem or planning some upgrade or change to the environment. So you ask, "what was that command again to determine the version of TIM, TAM, WAS, TDI, etc...? And as usual for every piece of the puzzle the commands or procedure for determining the versions and fix packs are different. Then, finding this information on the IBM Support site or the Information Center for some pieces is difficult. You would think that for each product the first chapter of the Problem Determination Guide would start with "How to determine your product version and fix pack level". NOT!

I'm simply listing here the results of my hour and 1/2 of internet searches here to hopefully save time when I need this info again. There are by the way some very good IBM Wiki sites for this info. I've listed some below. It's crazy though that these Wiki's did not show up in my searches of the IBM Support site.

Check Version Info for TDS 5.2

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268258&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

rpm –qa | grep ldap
rpm –qa | grep db2
rpm –qa | grep gsk
ls –l /usr/ldap/bin
ibmslapd -V

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured please collect the output of:
ls -l /usr/ldap/idstools/IDSWebApp.war

Check for version info for TDS 6.0

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268261&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

rpm -qa | grep -i ldap
rpm -qa | grep -i db2
rpm -qa | grep -i gsk
ibmslapd -V
idsilist -a

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured collect the output from:
./opt/ibm/ldap/V6.0/idstools/deploy_IDSWebApp.sh -v

Check for version info for TDS 6.1

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21268263&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

/opt/ibm/ldap/V6.1/bin/idsversion
rpm -qa | grep -i gsk
idsilist -a

If you are using DB2 v9.1 or higher issue the following command:
/usr/local/bin/db2ls

Otherwise issue:
rpm -qa | grep -i db2

If the Web Administration Tool is installed and configured, please collect the following:
/opt/IBM/ldap/V6.1/idstools/deploy_IDSWebApp -v

Check version of the TDS Web Admin Tool (Any version)

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=767&context=SSVJJU&q1=version&uid=swg21320615&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Check for Version of WebSphere

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=638&context=SSPREK&q1=version&uid=swg21306756&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en

Example:

versionInfo.sh in the app_server_root\bin directory.

Check for version info for TAMeB

http://www.ibm.com/software/info/testinfo.jsp?uid=IC000043

Example:

pdversion

Check for version info for TIM

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+Product+Fixpack+Levels

From the TIM Admin Console, open the "About" page

Example:

Server name: secperf12
Version: 5.0.0.3
Build number: 200809241018
Maintenance level: IF0014
Build date: September 24 2008
Build time: 10:18:08 GMT-05:00

Check for version info for GSKit

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+IBM+GSKit+Fixpack+Level

Check for version info for TDI 6.0


http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/tivoliim/Determining+IBM+Tivoli+Directory+Integrator+Fixpack+Level

Check for version info for TDI 6.1

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21302983

Example:

Unix/Linux -
1) cd /usr/ibm/common/acsi/bin
2) //source the setenv.sh
. /var/ibm/common/acsi/setenv.sh
3) //run the listIU.sh
./listIU.sh | grep -i tdiserversiu


Check for version info for TIM Agents


http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=644&context=SSTFWV&dc=DA420&dc=DA480&dc=DA490&dc=DA430&dc=DA410&dc=DB600&dc=DA400&dc=D600&dc=D700&d

c=DB520&dc=DB510&dc=DA500&dc=DA470&dc=DA4A20&dc=DA460&dc=DA440&dc=DB550&dc=DB560&dc=DB700&dc=DB530&dc=DA4A10&dc=DA4A30&dc=DB540&q1=version&uid=s

wg21140454&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&lang=en


Example:

Run agentCfg -> Configuration Settings