See you next week at the ForgeRock Open Identity Summit…

Time is running fast and the ForgeRock Open Identity Summit is just around the corner.

For those who haven’t registered yet, I believe that there are still a few spots available : 
http://forgerock.com/summit/
.

For the other ones, I’m looking forward to see you next week, in sunny and beautiful Pacific Grove.

Tips: Do not index virtual attributes in OpenDJ

OpenDJ, the open source LDAP directory service in Java, offer some interesting services to reduce and optimize the size and usage of data.

One of them is the Virtual Attribute feature, which allow certain attributes and values to be computed as needed, either based on some of the server internals or other attributes. OpenDJ ships with a number of virtual attributes by default : entryDN, entryUUID, etag, gouverningStructureRule, hasSubordinate, isMemberOf, numSubordinate, password Expiration Time (ds-pwp-password-expiration-time), structuralObjectClass, subSchemaSubEntry, …

Since these attributes are virtual and thus not stored as part of the entries in the database backend, you must not define any index for them. When possible, the virtual attribute provider will make use of default system index (like entryDN uses the DN index), but most of the time, these attributes are for reading and consuming.

If you do configure an index for one of the virtual attribute, the server will repeatedly report that the index is degraded with an error message similar to the following :

[21/Jan/2013:09:16:07 +0000] category=JEB severity=NOTICE msgID=8847510 msg=Due to changes in the configuration, index dc_example_dc_com_entryDN is currently operating in a degraded state and must be rebuilt before it can be used

And then some seaches may fail to return entries. So you must delete this index to let the server behave properly.

Making OpenDJ easier for Linux, DevOps and the cloud…

I’ve recently made some changes on the OpenDJ nightly builds page and made available 2 new deliveries for OpenDJ : an RPM package and a Debian package.

The goal of providing native packages for OpenDJ is to make things much easier for the Linux system administrators and the DevOps  who want to deploy OpenDJ automatically, as well as for whoever wants to run OpenDJ in a VM in the cloud.

There has been several other efforts to build native packages for OpenDJ, here and there, but due to the structure of OpenDJ deliveries, you could not properly upgrade versions. The packages available with the nightly builds are taking advantage of the new upgrade mechanism that has been developed, allowing an easier and smoother migration from previous releases.

If you do use the packaged version, make sure you log any bugs you find in theOpenDJ issue tracker.

I’d like to thank Danny Turner for his great contributions to the OpenDJ native packaging.

Meeting the Open Identity Stack Community

We’ve been thinking about this since the begining of ForgeRock, and we’ve finally set a date, a great location and even lined up Keynote speakers.

Join us on June 12th to 14th, 2013, in Pacific Grove, California for the first ForgeRock Open Identity Summit, an event for and with the community of the OpenAM, OpenDJ and OpenIDM projects. The agenda is still work in progress and will be previewed soon. But you can be part of it. A call for paper is opened, but not for long. You have up to May 6th to submit your proposals for presentations. Don’t wait for the last minutes !

A note on logistics, please make sure to book your hotel, registration is not complete until you’ve booked your room!  Space at Asilomar is filling up, so we encourage you to register ASAP to reserve your spot.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at the event!

Busy engineering center at ForgeRock.

Today is a very busy day at ForgeRock Grenoble engineering center, with the visit of Jamie, our VP of engineering, engineers for UK and our partner ProfiQ.

OpenDJ Roadmap Update…

It took us some time to evaluate and refine the roadmap for OpenDJ, but it’s finally there. We’ve updated the Roadmap on the wiki, and set a date for the next release of OpenDJ.

The first change decided is that the next release will be versioned 2.6. We got the feedback that the versioning scheme with Xpress releases and final releases with the same version number is confusing. Moving forward, we will try to keep the following scheme : a stable release will have an even minor number and development releases will have an odd number.

We’ve also set the date for the release to end of Q2 of 2013 (end of June).

The REST to LDAP service has now been integrated in OpenDJ server, although not fully featured yet. The team is working really hard to deliver the remaining features by June, and closing the few remaining important defects. If you want to start evaluating the REST to LDAP service, just grab a recent nightly build. Mark is doing a great job of documenting the REST features as they become available.

We will soon make the RPM and Debian packages available for tests with the nightly builds, along with the new upgrade mechanism, and then enter a cycle of stabilization before the 2.6.0 release.

Feedback is important for us, so please download and test the nightly builds, report success via email or issues in our bug tracking tool.

Series B…

After a record Q1, ForgeRock has now secured $15M in series B financing.

This is a great news, and is definitely setting us on a great global growth path.

Welcome to our new partner Foundation Capital, and thanks to Accel Partners for the renewed investment.

Upcoming events: LavaJUG & Devoxx France

I will be at the LavaJUG (Java User Group from Clermont-Ferrand, France) this Thursday from 19:00 to 21:00, presenting our experience with the OpenDJ project with building a highly scalable and high performance server in Java. The presentation is based on what I’ve already presented in a few JUG in France (AlpesJUG, MarsJUG, PoitouCharentesJUG,…) and Switzerland (JUG Lausanne), but has been updated with regards to GarbageFirst GC and the most recent HotSpot JVM.

 

And next week, from  March Wednesday 27th to Friday 29th, you will find ForgeRock at the Devoxx France conference.

Come to our conference session about “Enterprise Security in a Cloudy and Mobile World” (the session is in French). The session is on Friday 29th, from 11:45 to 12:35, in Miles Davis room. Mark it on your calendar, and if you miss it, make sure you stop by our booth (B3) to say hello and talk with some of our engineers. We will also be present at the HackerGarten on Wednesday from 14:00 to 18:00, should you want to have fun with one of our open source projects : OpenAM, OpenDJ or OpenIDM.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

But before diving in the details of the blog itself, I’d like to do a short personal and professional review of 2012.

2012 has been an amazing year. We’ve grown ForgeRock at an incredible pace, doubling the staff, globally as well as in France. We’ve moved to new offices, with some extra space to welcome additional stars to our band (yes, we’re still hiring and looking for developers with excellent Java programming skills). We’ve made available 3 releases of OpenDJ, 3 of OpenIDM and 1 major release of OpenAM. However we missed our target of releasing OpenDJ 2.5. With the growth of the team and the company, we’ve made the OpenDJ release more ambitious than originally planned, adding a REST/Json to LDAP service, to facilitate the development of applications that need to access the data. All of it should be available in the coming months.

Blogging wise, I’m satisfied with the ratio of articles published until July, then the workload has impacted my ability to write as often as I would like… Part of the new year resolutions is to resume posting here at a regular pace, similar or better than in 2012. I hope you will enjoy reading and joining the discussion…

Now with the annual report :

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

OpenDJ scripts and utilities on github

Following the exemple of my colleague Chris, I’ve pushed a set of OpenDJ scripts and utilities for that I’ve wrote and used in the past to github.

You will find script for log statistics, converting schema, …

Feel free to use, and if you have suggested enhancements, patches, I’ll be looking for pull request !

“Parlez vous Français ?” @ JavaOne 2012 !

JavaOne, like most of conferences, serves 2 purposes. First it is the place to learn about the theme of the conference, in the case of JavaOne, the Java platform, language and environment. There are presentations, demos, keynotes for all of that. But more importantly, it is the place to socialize, meet friends and acquaintances, strengthen your network(s).

And so, we had on Tuesday evening, right after ForgeRock party, a “French dinner”. More specifically, a dinner with French speaking persons that are quiet active, one way or another, in the Java community. We, French, do love food and spending hours over a meal discussing, joking, laughing, sipping wine in good company. This year was no different, as the few photos can illustrate.

Thanks to Guillaume Laforge, leader of the Groovy community, for organizing it this year.

Another nice ForgeRock event

Yesterday, on the side of the JavaOne and OOW conferences, we had an executive round table with selected partners, customers and future customers. The event started with a 30 minutes speech by Scott McNealy, Sun founder and former CEO, also active supporter of ForgeRock.

Scott touched on the values and benefits of open source software, gave a top 12 reasons why you know your Identity and Access Management solution is not open source and talked briefly about his new company Wayin.

Mike Wilson, VP and CISO at McKesson, presented how McKesson has started to use ForgeRock Open Identity Stack for several projects and the benefits of our solution.

Thanks Scott, Mike and all for your participation.

Meeting ForgeRock during JavaOne / OOW

If you want to meet ForgeRock and you’re in the San Francisco bay during JavaOne and Oracle Open World, there will be several opportunities to meet some of us: our CEO, our Sales team, some of our developers or myself.

Sunday September 30th:

I will be participating in the JUG Leaders meetings and discussions as well as the GlassFish ones (when schedule allows). Later, you can find me at the GlassFish and Friends Party from 8pm to 10pm at The Thirsty Bear.

Monday October 1st:

JavaOne attendees should be able to see me during the conference. I will be part of a panel discussion on Open Source Identity and Access Management solutions, from 5:30pm to 6:15pm.

Following that, some ForgeRock employees and I will be at the 2nd Annual Solaris Family reunion from 7:00pm to 11:00pm. The event, part of the ZFS Day, is free, but please register here.

 

Tuesday October 2nd:

Come and meet the developers and other members of the open source projects supported by ForgeRock. We’re having a Beer Burst party from 5:00pm until 8:30pm at The House of Shields. Please register through eventbrite so that we know how many to expect.

Rest of the week…

Otherwise, throughout the week, I will be most of the time at the JavaOne conference or in the ForgeRock San Francisco offices with the local team. Please send me an email or message me on Twitter (@LudoMP) to arrange a meeting.  I will be leaving California for New York on Monday, October 8th.

I hope to see a large number of people from the OpenDJ, OpenAM or OpenIDM community, other open source projects, ex-coworkers, future customers, and friends during my stay.

OpenDJ 2.4.6 is now available

As few days after an important milestone for OpenDJ, the open source LDAP directory server in Java, I’m happy to announce that a new bug fix release of  the 2.4 series has just been made available. OpenDJ 2.4.6 is an update release of the OpenDJ project and improves reliability and performances with large groups and entries, as well as very large databases. The full details about the release have been posted in the OpenDJ 2.4.6 Release Notes. Upgrading to this release is recommended for everyone running earlier versions. For additional features and bug fixes, please use OpenDJ 2.5.0-Xpress1.

The release is built out of revision 8102 of the b2.4 branch of the code repository.

As usual, you can find every thing on the OpenDJ Downloads page:

• The Java WebStart Installer
• The Zip package (the SHA signature is here).
• The SVR4 package for Solaris users. Note that the SVR4 package has only been tested with sanity tests.
• The DSML gateway for those who want to provide a web service access to their LDAP directory server.

The draft documentation for OpenDJ, and more specifically the Administration Guide, has been updated on the OpenDJ project site, still on the track for an accurate, reviewed version for OpenDJ 2.5.

Feedback is important to us and you can participate on the IRC channel, the mailing lists or join our community.

Enjoy !

Tab Sweep Summer Edition

Closing tabs and removing bookmarks in my browser before going on vacation, I ought to post a few links before :

ForgeRock is growing and I’m happy to count Chris Ridd as a new member of the OpenDJ team. Chris’ main focus will be support and sustaining, but he’s already started building knowledge information and posted an article on our wiki about using Eclipse for OpenDJ development; and has a new feature enhancement in progress.

Open source projects likes other open source projects. For the last few months, Silverpeas has been running demos, testing with the OpenDJ LDAP directory service. They’ve moved one step closer with integrating OpenDJ in their unit test framework, posted the JUnit module on GitHub, and documented the process. A French version of the article is also available.

Bill Nelson keeps on publishing snippets of the OpenDJ Administration, Maintenance and Tuning class, and this week posted an Architecture overview of the OpenDJ directory server.

Version 2.0 of the LDAP Synchronization Connector (LSC-Project) has been released. I need to give a try to the new version, as LSC has been proved to be helpful for migrating directory services.

Dave Koelmeyer wrote a simple article, yet very useful, describing how to enable LDAP secondary group memberships with Ubuntu 12.04 and OpenDJ.

Phil Lembo, alias ELDAPO, posted a short article to describe how to update the JVM version used by OpenDJ. There are some good reasons for enforcing some stickiness with the version of the JVM, but controlling the runtime environment for a service that can be critical is the major one.

Have I already mentioned that we’re hiring ? If you’re a developer, have some good object oriented programming experience with Java, and want to live close to the Alps, enjoying cycling, hiking or hand-gliding during summer time and skiing or snowboarding in winter, then you should apply now.