The need of claim based security model and identity federation

The last couple of days I have been working on Windows Identity Foundation. In order to take advantage of this framework, you should start writing claim based application. Forget the old fashion role based and start demanding claims! Why to convert to claim based application you may wonder... There are many reasons why you should do that but the most appealing ones I can think of are the following:

Building openvpn 2.1.1 with enable-password-save on windows

Lately I’ve been having some requests on how to build openvpn 2.1.1 with enable-password-save. The truth is that a few things have changed since my last post. In order to fill these requests I decided to write down a few things about the process. If you are intrested in downloading an allready compiled version or openvpn 2.1.1 with enable-password-save, check out this post.

Asp.net 4.0 URL rewriting aka Routing

Are you tired of having ugly urls in your website like product.aspx?product=1? Are you concerned about having a search engine optimized web site? Asp.net provides the mean to easily rewrite your urls via the System.Web.Routing namespace.

I have composed a simple asp.net website with lots of comments in it, that demonstrates this new (not so new actually because this mechanism exists since .net 3.5 sp1) mechanism.

WIF Custom STS metadata file editor

The last couple of days I have been wondering in the magic world of Identity Federation. Although the windows identity foundation SDK provides a great tool to associate an RP (Relying Party) application with an existing STS (Security Token Service), it requires that the STS have a Federation metadata xml file. If you simply want to automatically generate the STS from the application, then the SDK provide the automatic STS generation on the right click of the RP website, which generates a new STS web site (in c#) based on the RP’s web config file. On the other hand, if you are up to creating a new custom STS without the RP, then you have to manually create the manifest file, which is really very frustrating! On my search around the net I found a couple of federation metadata file creators but none of them had the ability to edit an existing one. Unfortunately, I had to edit the manifest file quite often and thus I had to create a tool to do so. This is why I created the STS Federation Metadata Editor which you may download freely on the following link.

Hope this simplifies your custom STS development efforts!

Autostart application that requires UAC on user logon in windows 7 without verifying them

I wanted to make windows autorun some application (like openvpn-gui and SQL 2005 Service Manager) whenever I logged in in order to have them loaded in the tray. Placing them in the Startup folder would autostart them but I had to confirm both of them in the UAC (User Account Control) since they both run as administrator. In order to bypass this, I had to schedule them in the windows scheduler. In order to do so you must follow the following steps.

Hard reset password on asp.net membership provider (applied to DNN)

I just moved a DNN (DotNetNuke) installation from a computer to another and restored the database in order to be able to work locally. DNN uses asp.net Membership as its default security provider thus I could not login to the web site (all passwords are encrypted using the local machine key). In order to override the password I wrote the following lines of code:

Dim mu As MembershipUser = Membership.GetUser("MyUserName")
mu.ChangePassword(mu.ResetPassword(), "mytoughpassword")

In the default page’s init event. This is the way to programmatically change any membership account’s password.

Happy coding and don't forget to delete the above mentioned lines after reseting the passwords!

Επιδιόρθωση του MBR

Όσοι έχουν dual boot windows με Linux με boot loader το grub έχουν σίγουρα αντιμετωπίσει το φαινόμενο να μην ξεκινάει ο υπολογιστής και να πετάει κάποιο σφάλμα ο grub. Σε αυτές τις περιπτώσεις, μια επανεγκατάσταση του grub μπορεί να επιλύσει το πρόβλημα που αντιμετωπίζεται. Για αυτό μάζεψα παρακάτω τις οδηγίες που επιτυγχάνουν την επιδιόρθωση του boot sector.