www.idmwizard.com

I was working with a client today that wants to rework what their URL looks like, and actually try to put in session data into it.  The reasons for this vary, and are irrelevant, but suffice to say this was a critical piece of functionality for their site.  Initially, I said “absolutely – Webthority can do this!” knowing that I’ve used Webthority’s URL rewriting capabilities in the past.

However, as we put everything into place, nothing happened.  And it turned out that the URL re-writing that they wanted (which is to put in the session id into the URL) wasn’t available until the user authenticated.  That sort of ‘URL mangling’ only happened when an authentication agent was used!  I’ve never used Webthority without one, which makes sense since it often used for Web SSO, and you always want to authenticate, right?

In any case, after a lot of stumbling and bumbling around, Paul H clued me into how the Custom Authentication Agent was used.  The documentation is pretty scant on it, so I created this 2.5 minute video outlining the changes I had to make in order to get the user to automatically authenticate and establish a session.

This is where I came up with the term ‘promiscuous authenticator.’  In a perfect world, this would be another option, just like LDAP or Database.  But for the time being, this will work.

http://www.idmwizard.com/quest/WebthorityCustomAuth/index.html

Hopefully, this will help others that are looking to configure Webthority’s Custom Authentication Agent.

I’ve converted over to using a Mac full-time for work, and its not been without its challenges.  But one of the most annoying things is when I download something, and then go to open it, I get prompted as to whether I actually want to open.  This smacks of Window’s UAC which is one thing I was glad to leave behind in the conversion.  Thankfully, through a lot of searching, I was able to find this solution.  Create a text file with the following text:

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN”
“http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0?>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategoryNeutral</key>
<dict>
<key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
<array>
<string>public.item</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Now, simply put the file in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist .  This is a user-specific setting, so the ~ indicates the user’s home folder.  Every user will need this file in their preferences if they don’t want this behavior.

Will this make your machine more ‘insecure?’  Absolutely, so be sure to know what you’re doing by choosing this option.  And if you do it, and are not satisfied, its on you – I take no responsibility for you downloading some malware.