Oracle Directory Manager and Application Development

Oracle Directory Manager is a Java-based tool for administering Oracle Internet Directory (LDAP). The Oracle Directory Manager is the main directory administration tool and it is installed with Oracle Internet Directory.

When developing applications there is often one or more central LDAP directories for developers to use. When working on a new application it is often necessary to reset entries, test scenarios, etc. However, it is unlikely that everyone’s desktop will have the entire OID installation. On my desk alone there are 3 desktop machines, and one laptop and non of them have the full Identity Management stack. In fact, the laptop is from when I was with Siebel so, although it was manufactured this century, it has little more than JDeveloper, Thunderbird and Oracle Calendar running on it.

One easy way to have Oracle Directory Manager on every developer’s machine, but not having to install anything else, is to take advantage of the fact that it is a Java application.

To achieve this, copy some jars (over 15 of them!) from the ORACLE_HOME/jlib and the ORACLE_HOME/ldap/oidadmin directories to a directory on your PC. Let’s call it oidadmin. Keep the directory structures. The entire list of jars is below. The main class is oracle.ldap.admin.client.NavigatorFrame and there are a few parameters that need to be passed to it. The entire command line is too long to type, let alone remember, so put it all in a file called oidadmin.cmd (when on windows) in the same oidadmin directory.

oidadmin.cmd
java -ms4m -mx128m -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Dsun.java2d.font.DisableAlgorithmicStyles=true -classpath "./ldap/oidadmin/osdadmin.jar; ./jlib/netcfg.jar; ./jlib/help4.jar; ./jlib/help4-nls.jar; ./jlib/oracle_ice.jar; ./jlib/jewt4.jar; ./jlib/share.jar; ./jlib/ewt3.jar; ./jlib/ewt3-nls.jar; ./jlib/ewtcompat-3_3_15.jar; ./jlib/swingall-1_1_1.jar; ./jlib/dbui2.jar; ./jlib/dbui2-nls.jar; ./ldap/oidadmin/oidldap.jar; ./ldap/oidadmin/netutil.jar; ./jlib/oemlt-9_0_2.jar; ./jlib/ldapjclnt10.jar" oracle.ldap.admin.client.NavigatorFrame -AdminRoot:Start -ldap -AdminRoot:End -LDAPRoot:Start -meta -ohhome "." -LDAPRoot:End

The above is formatted for readability and should be all on the one line. On windows I create shortcut on the desktop to the command file. The final touch is to use the OID Directory Manager icon for the shortcut. Any machine with Java can become a OID Directory Manager machine which I have found really useful for demonstrations and collaboration with developing new solutions.

The differences between Cheque and Check

Banking is old, very old. The first banks were probably the religious temples of the ancient world, as long as 5,000 years ago. Banks probably predated the invention of money. The current modern western financial products and services can be traced back to the coffee houses of London. Even that was a long time ago. The London Royal Exchange was built in the 16th centuary!

Although North American and Northern European banking share a similar beginning, as you would expect, down through the years, differences in certain practices have emerged. The most obvious difference is the spelling of Cheque. While the rest of the planet uses the term Check, the Common Wealth Nations, and Ireland, use the less ambiguous spelling.

Another notable difference between banking practices on opposite sides of the Atlantic is the use of checks. The use of checks in Europe have been in decline over the past 20 years. Only Ireland, Britain and France use checks to any significant degree. With the advent of debit cards and electronic funds transfers the checkbook has all but disappeared. I’m certain there are people working in German banks that have never seen a EuroCheque.

One of the things I liked about banking in the US, when I was living in Boston, was the range of personalised checkbooks available. The use of personalised checkbooks, for regular retail customers, is one of the nice touches to banking in North America which one does not get in Europe.

Not only can a customer be issued personlised checkbooks, but they can print their own! The use of computer checks is steadily growing particularly by sole traders & small businesses which would not normally qualify for big business perks with their banks. Computer checks are cost effective and make a really powerful, professional impression. Many of the accounting and money management software packages in use today support the printing of checks. There are also preprinted paper stock available for use with them, such as QuickBooks Checks and Quicken Checks.

Infact, there is a huge business built up around the humble check in the USA. Perhaps this is the reason the check has not disappeared from the North American banking system to the extent it has in Europe.

LifeLock – Identity Theft Protection

Although the FFIEC advices against it, many banks, particularly in the USA, still use single factor authentication for most, if not all of their services. The banks do, however, implement a number of pattern and behaviour matching in an attempt to find account fraud and identity theft. This is somewhat reassuring until you realise that bank staff, and government agency employees, have been known to loose laptops with customer data, and worse still, not follow their own corporate policies on data protection.

Fraud and identity theft protection is a consumer, as well as corporate issue. In my day job I focus on the corporate solutions, but there are consumer solutions out there too. One consumer solution of note is Life Lock, which provides some novel approaches to tackling this problem. These include registering, and continually registering, fraud alerts with credit bureaus, monitoring address changes and a $1,000,000 guarantee to cover costs of restoring things to their proper state if a fraud does take place. The fact that they can put an end to getting those annoying pre-approved credit letters may well be the most significant immediate value for some.

One of the interesting automated services provided is the recently announced eRecon, which trawls the murky underbelly of the Internet to see if your personal information, or a snippet of same, shows up in the identity thieves’ marketplaces. I guess you could call it the Black Ops of identity theft protection.

My point is that not only is multi-factor authentication a must, but multi-factor identity protection, both corporate and consumer, is a must in the information age.

1 Year Old Today!

It was exactly one year ago that the SOA Station blog went on air. For me, it is really interesting to look back over the content posted and compare it to what was originally envisaged. What is immediately obvious is the broad range of topics within the SOA subject: Security, Governance, Scalability, Quality & Reliability, and of course Interoperability.

Over the entire year, according to Google Analytics, the site received 28.11 visits per day. There was a dramatic increase in September when the blog was listed on Oracle Blogs. Visits per day since then works out as 39.13. Since the beginning of this year, the visits per day is at 51.58. This increase is really encouraging. People are obviously accessing the blog from work as the number of site visits on a Saturday and Sunday are tiny.

The top content (most number of views) is:

SCA Diagram stencil for Visio

Java IBAN check digit validation

Custom XSLT functions in Oracle BPEL and ESB

Oracle Lite and SOA Suite

JAX-WS & JAXB rock and roll…

One thing that did surprise me was the level of interest in the industry specific functionality, rather than the generic technical content. The IBAN Check Digit Validation article is one of the post popular on the site. I’ll certainly look into providing more industry specific content. Suggestions welcome.