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March 09, 2004
Linux Logical Volume Manager
If you've never played with multi-disk volumes on Linux, they're pretty cool. This article at LinuxJournal is about using LVM and removable IDE drives, instead of tapes, for backups.. Not a bad idea. Even if you don't need that kind of back-up solution, the article is a good intro to LVM.
05:59 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The World Live Web
Why is RSS important? Because it says "here's what's changed on the Web." When I started building Web sites in 1993, it was very clear then that people visit sites that get updated frequently. That's still true. Now, however, we have a new tool, RSS, that tells us what's changed. I no longer have to limit my reading to sites I know get updated frequently. Instead, I get pinged whenever sites I'm interested in change. That's a fundamental shift in what the Web is. In fact, its something brand new. Doc Searls' son Allen Searls calls it the World Live Web. I like that.
05:51 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Identity Federation
There was some interesting discussions during today's Ping Identity Advisory Board meeting. I've made some notes about things that caught my attention.
Identity needs to follow transaction as it cross security domain. Consequently, Ping's goal is to reduce friction in every transaction while maintaining security. There are some pain points that enterprises and consumers feel that provide an opportunity for Ping and other companies in this space:
- Too many identities, identity not portable.
- Transactions are increasingly inter-company (the extended enterprise) driven by web services, on-demand computing, outsourced business processes.
Salesforce.com is an example of an extended-enterprise operation that manages business processes for clients in an outsourced fashion. Right now, Salesforce.com maintains their own user directory and does not federate. To understand the problem this creates, imagine that you just had to lay off a group of salepeople. HR cuts their access to corporate systems, but they can still go into Salesforce.com and download all of your company's proprietary sales data. Provisioning in this environment might be frustrating, but non-federated deprovisioning can be costly.
Vendors of identity products try to set up hub-and-spoke style systems to lock-in users. They want their product at the hub and spokes feeding into that revenue stream. Networks eventually eat hub-and-spoke systems because of cost. This is what played out in the financial services market decades ago. Large regional banks were essentially hubs in a regional hub-and-spoke financial system. When large financial networks ('ala Visa and Mastercard) came into being, they quickly put regional financial systems out of business based on cost. There was no reason to have the regional systems in-between the merchant and the network. All it did was add cost, without adding value. So too identity federation?
SourceID 2.0's architecture is based on a workflow engine to support multiple protocols by mapping each message into a workplan that routes it through various modules in the engine according to what has to happen. This architecture provides a flexible architecture for supporting SAML, Liberty, and WS-Federation. This reminds me of some of the Web Services Intermediaries architectures that are used for processing SOAP messages.
05:25 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Wired on ATTWS's Phone Downgrade
A Wired article on the AT&T phone trade-in I wrote about a few days ago--for anyone who wants more details.
01:58 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Ping Identity Advisory Board Meeting
I flew my plane to Denver this morning to attend an advisory board meeting for Ping Identity. This will be the first time we've all gotten together; previously it just been phone calls. This will be fun: a chance to catch up with some friends and learn about the latest with Ping. The flight was great--perfect winter flying. Blue skies, smooth air, and a good tailwind. I was doing nearly 200MPH on the way here and made it in just a little over 2 hours. I'll write about some of the new developments at Ping when we're done.
12:29 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Chatting with Doug Kaye
Doug Kaye, from IT Conversations called yesterday to talk for a bit. Our conversation, that touched on my recent experience with SpamCop.net and the Ask Phil forum I just started. Our conversation can be heard, along with conversations with Rich Miller and Robert Scoble at IT Conversations.