XPlanner Authentication with NTLM

I spent most of the day setting up XPlanner and the documentation seemed to be lacking in a few spots. I'll go over the caveats I stumbled on.

The XPlanner install was happening on the lone linux box (Fedora 8) on an NT domain. The box was almost completely empty so I had to install java first. I chose to install the jsdk 1.4.2 even though that version's is EOL'd. XPlanner hasn't been updated in a while (since 2006) and I didn't want to mess w/ a new version of the sdk.

I upacked and installed the "standalone" version of XPlanner 0.7b7. So far so good. I was immediately able to use the default username/password to login.

The hardest part was figuring out how to authenticate based on our NT credentials. Most of the configuration occurs in the xplanner-0.7b7-standalone/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/xplanner.properties file.

Here's how I was able to get the NT authentication to work. In the xplanner.properties file, find the authentication strings:


#
# XPlanner security configuration
#
xplanner.security.login[0].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.XPlannerLoginModule
xplanner.security.login[0].name=XPlanner
xplanner.security.login[0].option.userIdCaseSensitive=true
xplanner.security.login[0].option.debug=true

#xplanner.security.login[1].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.jndi.JNDILoginModule
#xplanner.security.login[1].name=JNDI
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userIdCaseSensitive=false
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.debug=true
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionURL=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionName=cn=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionPassword=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.digest=SHA
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userPattern=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userPassword=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.authentication=simple
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.derefAliases=never
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userSearch=cn={0}
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userSubtree=true
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleBase=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleName=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleSearch=(uniqueMember={0})

# NTLM login module
#xplanner.security.login[2].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.ntlm.NtlmLoginModule
#xplanner.security.login[2].name=NTLM
#xplanner.security.login[2].option.userIdCaseSensitive=false
#xplanner.security.login[2].option.domain=DOMAIN
#xplanner.security.login[2].option.controller=CONTROLLER


To use the NTLM module, comment out the first set to security strings, uncomment the NTLM strings, and change the NTLM array index to 0. Here's how my file looked after I finished.


#
# XPlanner security configuration
#
#xplanner.security.login[0].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.XPlannerLoginModule
#xplanner.security.login[0].name=XPlanner
#xplanner.security.login[0].option.userIdCaseSensitive=true
#xplanner.security.login[0].option.debug=true

#xplanner.security.login[1].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.jndi.JNDILoginModule
#xplanner.security.login[1].name=JNDI
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userIdCaseSensitive=false
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.debug=true
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionURL=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionName=cn=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.connectionPassword=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.digest=SHA
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userPattern=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userPassword=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.authentication=simple
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.derefAliases=never
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userSearch=cn={0}
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.userSubtree=true
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleBase=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleName=
#xplanner.security.login[1].option.roleSearch=(uniqueMember={0})

# NTLM login module
xplanner.security.login[0].module=com.technoetic.xplanner.security.module.ntlm.NtlmLoginModule
xplanner.security.login[0].name=NTLM
xplanner.security.login[0].option.userIdCaseSensitive=false
xplanner.security.login[0].option.domain=DOMAIN
xplanner.security.login[0].option.controller=CONTROLLER


The NTLM module uses the local DB as a fall back, so any logins that you creaed locally that aren't in the Active Directory should still work.

JPEG Marker codes

I'm doing a bit of JPEG manipulation for a project and it took me longer than I would have liked to find a consise table of JPEG segment markers or frame markers or whatever you want to call them. Here's a C# enum with all the values. Hopefully that will save some typing for you.

        public enum JpegMarkers

        {

            // Start of Frame markers, non-differential, Huffman coding

            HuffBaselineDCT = 0xFFC0,

            HuffExtSequentialDCT = 0xFFC1,

            HuffProgressiveDCT = 0xFFC2,

            HuffLosslessSeq = 0xFFC3,




            // Start of Frame markers, differential, Huffman coding

            HuffDiffSequentialDCT = 0xFFC5,

            HuffDiffProgressiveDCT = 0xFFC6,

            HuffDiffLosslessSeq = 0xFFC7,




            // Start of Frame markers, non-differential, arithmetic coding

            ArthBaselineDCT = 0xFFC8,

            ArthExtSequentialDCT = 0xFFC9,

            ArthProgressiveDCT = 0xFFCA,

            ArthLosslessSeq = 0xFFCB,




            // Start of Frame markers, differential, arithmetic coding

            ArthDiffSequentialDCT = 0xFFCD,

            ArthDiffProgressiveDCT = 0xFFCE,

            ArthDiffLosslessSeq = 0xFFCF,




            // Huffman table spec

            HuffmanTableDef = 0xFFC4,




            // Arithmetic table spec

            ArithmeticTableDef = 0xFFCC,




            // Restart Interval termination

            RestartIntervalStart = 0xFFD0,

            RestartIntervalEnd = 0xFFD7,




            // Other markers

            StartOfImage = 0xFFD8,

            EndOfImage = 0xFFD9,

            StartOfScan = 0xFFDA,

            QuantTableDef = 0xFFDB,

            NumberOfLinesDef = 0xFFDC,

            RestartIntervalDef = 0xFFDD,

            HierarchProgressionDef = 0xFFDE,

            ExpandRefComponents = 0xFFDF,




            // App segments

            App0 = 0xFFE0,

            App1 = 0xFFE1,

            App2 = 0xFFE2,

            App3 = 0xFFE3,

            App4 = 0xFFE4,

            App5 = 0xFFE5,

            App6 = 0xFFE6,

            App7 = 0xFFE7,

            App8 = 0xFFE8,

            App9 = 0xFFE9,

            App10 = 0xFFEA,

            App11 = 0xFFEB,

            App12 = 0xFFEC,

            App13 = 0xFFED,

            App14 = 0xFFEE,

            App15 = 0xFFEF,




            // Jpeg Extensions

            JpegExt0 = 0xFFF0,

            JpegExt1 = 0xFFF1,

            JpegExt2 = 0xFFF2,

            JpegExt3 = 0xFFF3,

            JpegExt4 = 0xFFF4,

            JpegExt5 = 0xFFF5,

            JpegExt6 = 0xFFF6,

            JpegExt7 = 0xFFF7,

            JpegExt8 = 0xFFF8,

            JpegExt9 = 0xFFF9,

            JpegExtA = 0xFFFA,

            JpegExtB = 0xFFFB,

            JpegExtC = 0xFFFC,

            JpegExtD = 0xFFFD,




            // Comments

            Comment = 0xFFFE,




            // Reserved

            ArithTemp = 0xFF01,

            ReservedStart = 0xFF02,

            ReservedEnd = 0xFFBF

        };

eApps and yum

One of my new projects is hosted on eApps. While they've been great so far, I spent some time trying to get some real developer tools on my box using yum. The first problem was that php was failing with the following error:

PHP Warning: Module 'modulename' already loaded in Unknown on line 0

As it turns out that means that the xls package was included in the binary, and also being declared as a dynamic package. So, to fix this I commented out the following line in the /etc/php.d/xsl.ini:

;extension=xsl.so

Now on to yum itself. Doing any kind of yum update resulted in the following error:

Error: Missing Dependency: glibc-common = 2.3.4-2.36 is needed by package glibc-dummy-centos-4

After doing a bit of research, I found that the dummy-centos-4 package isn't really necessary if you're going to be upgrading your gcc libraries anyways so away it goes.

yum remove glibc-dummy-centos-4

After that I ran a full yum upgrade which worked just fine.

Stripping Accennts From Text With PHP

Most of the PHP string functions don't really work with UTF-8 encoded strings (http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=35520). I found this post on the Symfony forums that had a solution.

$text = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $text);

Done and done.

SQL Join with count

For the real estate site I've been working on, I needed to get a list of real estate offices and how many active listings they had on the MySQL DB we are using. I had a table of offices and a table of listings. I needed each office represented even if that office had no active listings. It seemed like an easy application of the left join command. Not quite as easy as I thought. Here's my first attempt:


SELECT
COUNT(listings.id), offices.id
FROM offices LEFT JOIN listings ON (offices.id = listings.office_id)
WHERE
listings.status = 1


However, this only returned office/count pair where the count was greater than 0. It seemed like the WHERE condition wasn't being applied correctly, like it was being applied AFTER the tables were joined. I wanted the WHERE condition to be applied to the listings table and then have the results joined to the offices table. So, here's the solution I found: in situations like this, the WHERE clause needed to be added to the ON clause in the LEFT JOIN like this:


SELECT
COUNT(listings.id), offices.id
FROM offices LEFT JOIN listings ON (offices.id = listings.office_id AND listings.status = 1)


Works like a charm.

Dynamic Credentials in Symfony

For a long time now I've been using dynamic credentials in Symfony as laid out in this code snippit: http://www.symfony-project.org/snippets/snippet/18.




// to put in the actions.class.php file
function getCredential()
{
  $this->post = $this->_retrievePost(); // retrieving the object based on the request parameters
  if ($this->getUser()->isOwnerOf($this->post))
    $this->getUser()->addCredential('owner');
  else
    $this->getUser()->removeCredential('owner');

  // the hijack is over, let the normal flow continue:
  return parent::getCredential();
}

However, it seems like this isn't really the proper way to add dynamic credentials. The getCredential() method is called by the Symfony FilterChain to discover what credentials that module requires, not to add credentials to the user.

For me, the problem cam to a head when I was trying to show a link if a user had a particular credential. The problem was that the page with the link was not a secure page. Since the page was not secute (is_secure: off in the config/security.yml file) the getCretential() method was never called.

The solution is to use the preExecute() method instead of getCredential()




// to put in the actions.class.php file
function preExecute()
{
  $this->post = $this->_retrievePost(); // retrieving the object based on the request parameters
  if ($this->getUser()->isOwnerOf($this->post))
    $this->getUser()->addCredential('owner');
  else
    $this->getUser()->removeCredential('owner');

  // the hijack is over, let the normal flow continue:
  return parent::getCredential();
}

Accent mode in Emacs 22

For a long time I used the emacs iso-accents-mode for my editing in Spanish. Looks like this has finally been removed from the standard emacs distros, so I had to figure out whatever they replaced it with. Here's what I (eventually) found: To get the same functionality as the old iso-accents-mode, you need to change the input mode. The official doc can be found here, but here are the basic commands.

M-x list-input-methods


C-x RETURN C-\ method RETURN
This is how to select the input method.

C-\
Toggles the input mode on/off. Pretty useful.

The mode I use is latin-1-prefix. It should be familiar to the iso-accents-mode followers.

Loading NetFlix Prize Data into MySQL

I may be a year late, but I decided to enter into the NetFlix Prize contest the other day. I've already got MySQL (Lampp) running on my box (Fedora 8) so I decided to load the data into my DB to do some basic analytics. There's some good info out there, but nothing that encompassed all the steps I took, so I'm going to repeat my process here.

1. Enter the Contest and download the dataset. Nothing too complicated here, you just need a unique team name and an email address.

2. Get Ruby where it needs to be. For this I used yum to install both the ruby and ruby-devel packages.

2a. Then you need to download and install Ruby/MySQL. Here are the basic steps from http://lafcadio.rubyforge.org/manual/ch02s02.html

wget http://tmtm.org/downloads/mysql/ruby/mysql-ruby-2.7.tar.gz
tar zxvf mysql-ruby-2.7.tar.gz
cd mysql-ruby-2.7
ruby extconf.rb --with-mysql-config
make
ruby test.rb [hostname] [username] [dbpassword]
sudo make install


2b. After that is all set and you can connect to the MySQL w/ the test.rb script, download the ruby DBI from here: http://www.kitebird.com/articles/ruby-dbi.html#TOC_3


wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/12368/dbi-0.1.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf dbi-0.1.1.tar.gz
ruby setup.rb config --with=dbi,dbd_mysql
ruby setup.rb setup
sudo ruby setup.rb install


In the config command, I chose to only include the MySQL packages of the DBI. I think it's generally better to only include the packages you want as opposed to always including everything. If you don't specify which DB packages you want, the installer will assume you want everything. If you don't have all of the required development packages already on your machine (ie oracle and sybase) you'll get into errors when you run the setup command.

3. Now find a ruby script to load the data. I used this one from juretta:



#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# Created by Stefan Saasen on 2007-04-24.
# Copyright (c) 2007. All rights reserved.
require 'dbi'

# Configuration
DB_DATABASE = 'netflix'
DB_USER = 'user'
DB_PASSWORD = '******'

# Directory with netflix dataset
NETFLIX_DOWNLOAD_DIR = File.join("/sata_ext/net_flix")

NETFLIX_MOVIE_TITLES = File.join(NETFLIX_DOWNLOAD_DIR, "movie_titles.txt")
NETFLIX_TRAINING_SET = File.join(NETFLIX_DOWNLOAD_DIR, "training_set")

# Profile...
start = Time.now

# Connect to the MySQL database
DBI.connect("DBI:Mysql:#{DB_DATABASE}", DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD) do |dbh|
# create the necessary tables
stmts = DATA.read.split(";").delete_if{|stmt| stmt.strip.empty?}
stmts.each do |stmt|
# Execute the current SQL statement
dbh.do(stmt)
end

# 1. Insert movie titles into movie_titles table using simple INSERT STATEMENTS
sql = "INSERT INTO movie_titles (id, year_of_release, title) VALUES(?,?,?)"
# It would be even more efficient to use INSERT statements that
# use VALUES syntax which can insert multiple rows.
# e.g. INSERT INTO movie_titles (a,b,c) VALUES(1,2,3),(4,5,6),(7,8,9);
dbh.prepare(sql) do |sth|
File.open(NETFLIX_MOVIE_TITLES) do |f|
f.each do |line|
# Execute the prepared INSERT Statement
id, year_of_release, title = line.split(",")
sth.execute id.to_i, year_of_release.strip, title.strip
end
end
end

# 2. Insert rating data from training_set using the fast LOAD DATA INFILE syntax
# The filename contains the movie id!
sql = "LOAD DATA INFILE ? INTO TABLE ratings FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' "+
"IGNORE 1 LINES (customer_id, rating, date) SET movie_id = ?;"
dbh.prepare(sql) do |sth|
Dir[NETFLIX_TRAINING_SET + "/*.txt"].each do |trs_file|
puts "Importing #{trs_file}..."
if trs_file =~ /([0-9]+)\.txt$/
movie_id = $1.dup.to_i
else
raise "Missing movie_id (file: #{trs_file})"
end
# Execute the prepared statement using the .txt file and the movie_id
sth.execute File.expand_path(trs_file), movie_id
end
end

# Add index for certain columns
#puts "Creating index on the ratings table - may take a while"
#["CREATE INDEX mid_idx ON ratings (...)", "CREATE INDEX cid_idx ON ..."].each{|stmt| dbh.do(stmt)}
end
puts "Import successfully finished!\n"
puts "The netflix data import took #{sprintf("%0.2f", (Time.now - start)/60.0)} minutes"

__END__
DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS netflix;
CREATE DATABASE netflix /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 */;
USE netflix;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `movie_titles`;
CREATE TABLE `movie_titles` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`year_of_release` YEAR(4) default NULL,
`title` VARCHAR(250),
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `ratings`;
CREATE TABLE `ratings` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`movie_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`customer_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`date` date default NULL,
`rating` int(1),
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;


The last part there are the SQL commands to create the tables needed for this script.

I loaded all of the data onto my machine (Dual Intel 2.13 GHz w/ 1GB RAM) in about 13 minutes.