Blog
Articles, tutorials, and field notes on identity, integration, API management, and application security — spanning nearly two decades of hands-on work.
How To Rename a WS-Proxy or Multi-Protocol Gateway Object on a DataPower Appliance
Anyone who has worked with DataPower for a while has gotten into a situation where they need to rename a service object (XML Firewall, WS-Proxy, Multi-Protocol Gateway, etc). There isn’t a rename button that I have ever found. This tutorial will describe two ways of renaming such objects.
Thomas Erl’s SOA Book Series
I listed several of Thomas Erl’s books in my SOA Recommended reading list. A full list of Thomas Erl’s series of SOA books can be found here. Anyone working in the SOA space, regardless of vendor or technology stack, should read these books.
Who Owns DataPower Within An Organization?
The definition of the word ownership has varying meanings across organizations, but there is always a group that retains control of the technology. It’s typically the group that sponsored the adoption of the technology and owns day-to-day support of it. But, sometimes, the technology initiative…
DataPower and Terminal Servers…
DataPower has a serial port console that is used during initial bootstrap of the appliance, recovering from problems, and certain configuration changes. Having access to the serial console is the only feasible approach to resolving certain issues that arise with any appliance (or piece of network…
WebSphere DataPower Roles and Responsibilities…
DataPower is a weird (but, wonderful) beast. It has a tendency to break some of the traditional IT silos that develop within infrastructure groups. That can lead to a lot of friction and amusing arguments in which everyone is simply talking past one another. In this post, I want to describe the…
Three Internal Architectures—Designs for DataPower Deployments
I have been in several different shops that are either deploying DataPower or are a few years after deploying DataPower. I’ve also had opportunities to talk to numerous different DataPower technical resources about how they have utilized DataPower. In the post, I want to describe what I’ve seen as…
OSI 7-Layer Network Model
I’ve been playing with Cisco switches and routers recently at home to get a handle on VLANs-more about VLANs later. Some people I know who have gotten involved in DataPower started out in system administration or networking and worked their way up the technology stack to SOA Appliances (WebSphere…
Symmetric Keys—Addendum
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a brief post about how to generate symmetric keys that can be used with DataPower. It demonstrates how to generate shared keys of various lengths using the Unix dd command. Today, someone asked how a shared key (or symmetric key) can be generated using the openssl…
SSL Handshake—The Visual
This is an old picture that I made for a 2010 JBoss World security presentation. It came in handy not so long ago when I was explaining the SSL Handshake to someone.
IBM Impact 2012 Client Panel: Experiences with IBM SOA Stack Rollout
I will be leading a discussion panel at IBM Impact 2012 in Las Vegas on Monday, April 30th, 3:45-4pm. More information can be found here. It will be an open ended discussion and Q&A session detailing experiences rolling out IBM technology for an ESB. I’ve done this at a couple of different…
DataPower Extension Functions and Elements
Anyone who has spent time working with DataPower has had to write an XSLT stylesheet at some point. DataPower provides a library of functions and elements that provide access to various DataPower functionality.
XSLT & XPath
XSLT is the only scripting language supported by WebSphere DataPower appliances. It is the only way to customize DataPower functionality and behavior. So, anyone that works with DataPower for a while will sooner be writing XSLT stylesheets.