Orhan Alkan's Weblog

I am one of those who discovered OpenId very late. It's a shame; I have to live with it....

OpenId is decentralized and user-centric identity framework. It seems to be easy to use and implement. The number of OpenId enabled sites (consumers) supports this claim; openiddirectory.com host list of them.

Wikipedia provides good introductions about OpenId to whom are new, like me. I also found a lot of technical details at here.

Another good news is OpenSSO provides OpenId implementation under OpenSSO Extensions project; consequently we can use OpenSSO as OpenId provider as well.

Digital signature has been rarely known as authentication method so far. Yesterday, Turkcell announced new strong authentication service, mobile signature. Turkcell also provide as a service to big banks such as Garanti, Akbank,and Isbankasi.

Turkcell has been using Sun Java System Access Manager to provide Single-Signle On  to the subscribers using web based VAS services. Local Sun Professional Services team developed a custom authentication module for Access Manager to be integrated with mobile signature infrastructure. Consequently, the subscribers enjoys accessing VAS services using their digital signature.

I have installed OpenSSO eventually. I would like to thank Dennis Seah for his help. There are a few tricks you have to pay attention for s successful installation. In deed, It take 5 minutes to install.

First trick is username. It is amAdmin -be careful it is case sensitive! Second  is for the people who are familiar with Access Manager; the data store is file system not Sun directory. Do not look for directory configuration. Dennis told me the directory support will be available  soon. Central repository is crucial for fail-over and load balancing. I hope it doesn't take so long.

I have documented the steps you have to complete for a successful OpenSSO server installation. You can find it in PDF format here.

Next will be agent installation! It is a real adventure, isn't it? 

Tonight, I was very decisive to install opensso on my workstation. I prepared everything and setup all components (web server, directory server, etc.). Then I started to follow the instructions. It was end of a dream. It was almost impossible to setup opensso according to the provided documentation. In addition, all documentation are belong to Access Manager 7.1 and irrelevant to opensso.

I guess, our friends in the engineering were in rush, under time pressure and couldn't prepare documentation properly. It can happen. I believe they will fixed in the next days. I am ready to help as one more hand.

It seems that I have to delay my installation plan a few days....

Fulup Ar Foll has told me OpenSSO went live and asked me why I did not contribute to the project? I have been working on Access Manager and it was right question in the right time. So I decided to contribute the project. First thing I did is to establish this blog to share my experience with you effectively.

My objectives are regarding OpenSSO;

• Discovering and elaborating OpenSSO features
• Hacking OpenSSO and sharing my experience trough quick "how to" documents so that I want to help accelerating the learn curve of developers who are interested in OpenSSO
• Discovering technical/business expansion and integration possibilities with complementary technologies and sharing them trough white papers
• Enjoy playing with OpenSSO and fun!
  

I will start with installation of OpenSSO