OAM 11g Webgate Tuning

Introduction

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

People typically are introduced to Webgate tuning in one of two ways, either forced into it because of a crisis or actively preparing an environment to do some aggressive load testing.  Hopefully you are in the later group.  Unfortunately, there is still a lot of mystery behind tuning some of these Webgate parameters.  Creating a comprehensive article to cover all aspects of tuning is a real challenge.  That said, this article will be focused on what I feel are the most important tuning parameters; 1) Max Connections, including the relationship between Max Connections and Max Number of Connection, 2) the Failover Threshold, and 3) the AAA Timeout Threshold.  If you can grasp the concepts around these few important key parameters your success in getting better performance and stability out of the Webgates and Access Servers will greatly increase.

Part 2: Advanced Apache JMeter Stress Testing OAM and LDAP

In “Part 1: How To Load Test OAM11g using Apache JMeter” I talked about an example plan that could be used to load test OAM11g, which included some common configuration elements, some samplers for login, authorization, logout, and some listeners that provided result analysis.   In Part 2, I wanted to expand on an option to make JMeter send random logins and I will explain why, and then cover how to leverage JMeter to load test an LDAP server like OUD, OID, ODSE, or OVD.

Strategies for managing OAAM to OAM connections in production

Many Oracle Access Management 11g customers opt to deploy a combination of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager using the Advanced Integration option. This combination of product features can provide strong, adaptive authentication and fraud mitigation for online applications. In this post, we examine a number of strategies for configuring the connectivity between these components in order to provide scalability and high availability for production deployments.

OAM WebGate connections through firewalls

In this post, we investigate a complication that can occur if you require a firewall between your WebGate agents and your OAM 11g servers within your deployment topology. We provide some guidance related to how to configure your WebGates in this case. This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

How to (correctly) make manual edits to oam-config.xml

Occasionally, it is necessary to make changes to OAM 11g configuration by directly updating the oam-config,xml file, rather than using the OAM console.  In this post, we describe the correct way to make changes to this file. This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

A first look at POST data preservation in OAM 11g R2 PS1

In this post, we have a quick look at POST data preservation, a new feature introduced in the 11g R2 PS1 (or 11.1.2.1) version of Oracle Access Manager. We'll explain the problem that this feature solves and walk through a simple example explaining how to configure and use the feature. This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

OAM 11g Custom Authentication Plugins: Interacting with the Identity Store

The OAM 11g release includes a powerful authentication plugin framework, which can be used to extend the out-of-the-box authentication schemes, or to implement something completely custom. In this post, we explore how an authentication plugin can interact with the underlying LDAP Identity Store, via a simple example. This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

Part 3: OAM11g WNA Identity Store Considerations and Configurations

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

This is the final post of a three part series.  In "Part 1: Under the Covers of OAM11g WNA integration with Multiple AD Forests", I covered the flow of how WNA works and what was going on behind the scenes, and in "Part 2: How to Configure OAM11g WNA for Multiple AD Forests", I went into detail on how to configure WNA.  In this final post I am going to go over what I think would be two of the most common scenarios that the OAM11g Identity Store would be used for WNA, and how it impacts the Kerberos authentication module configurations.

Part 2: How to Configure OAM11g WNA for Multiple AD Forests

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy.  An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

This is the second post of a three part series.  In "Part 1: Under the Covers of OAM11g WNA integration with Multiple AD Forests", I covered the flow of how WNA works and what was going on behind the scenes.  This article will cover the technical details on how to implement WNA in a way that will support multiple Active Directory Forests that either have no transient trust between them, or even all trusted; in either case this will work for you.

Before we get into the details on how to setup WNA for multi Active Directory domains I just want to point out that I will use a straw man of three Active Directory KDC servers so you can understand any additional steps needed to support more than one KDC.  However, this would also work for as few as one domain, or more than three domains.  All that is needed is to simply extrapolate the steps to fit your requirements; I will be sure to comment where necessary.

Part 1: Under the Covers of OAM11g WNA integration with Multiple AD Forests

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

This is the first post of a three part series that expands on a great article Matt wrote --- “The (Windows) Natives Are Restless”. Matt’s article covered some configurations, browser settings, and some examples of role mapping, but I want to dive into this whole WNA solution a lot more. So Part 1 will include just what the title eludes to, Under the Covers of the WNA integration with Multiple Active Directory Forests, then Part 2 will cover the details of the WNA configuration to make it work against multiple untrusted or trusted domains, and finally in Part 3) some highlights on leveraging OVD11g to pull it all together and make sure WNA can find the correct user across multiple forests.

Unsolicited login with OAM 11gR2

In a previous post Chris Johnson has discussed unsolicited login with OAM 11g.

In OAM 11gR2 this functionality is supported out of the box and with little effort you can implement Unsolicited Login.

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

If you're interested to authenticate using unsolicited POST, please read on…

Password Policy in OAM 11g R2

One of the features in the new 11G R2 (or 11.1.2) release of Oracle Access Manager that's been most eagerly anticipated is the support for password policy within the OAM product; that is, the ability for OAM itself to support a subset of password management processes without the need to use Oracle Identity Manager and LDAP Sync. In this post, I'd like to explore this functionality in a little more detail and also explore exactly which use cases are supported.

This post is part of a larger series on Oracle Access Manager 11g called Oracle Access Manager Academy. An index to the entire series with links to each of the separate posts is available.

X509 Fallback to Form

OAM 11G does not provide an out of box solution for falling back to FORM authentication if X509 Certificate is not available or if the certificate is not accepted by the user. I have seen this requirement coming from customers and found a solution after brainstorming with my colleagues (special thanks to Chris Johnson and Brian Eidelman). The solution is not very difficult, though it needs some additional configurations and coding.

It should be noted that this solution is not for the use case where the user's authentication is rejected due to an invalid certificate by OAM and then the user needs to fallback to a FORM for another authentication attempt.

OAM/OVD JVM Tuning

Over the past few weeks I've been involved in several performance tuning exercises involving OAM and OVD.  I thought it would be helpful if I created a post sharing the process I use to analyse and improve performance in OVD and OAM.

Maximum Availability Whitepaper for IDM 11gR2

The Enterprise Deployment Guide (EDG) is a great resource to familiarize yourself with the Oracle recommended approach to deploying highly available infrastructure using Oracle's Fusion Middleware products.

As of today, the current EDG documentation supports the R1 release.  The R2 release will be out in a few months.  

However, there is an Maximum Availability Architecture white paper that describes in detail how to configure OAM, OIM and LDAP for maximum/high availability.

The first section of this white paper is a good overview of the design topology for a robust infrastructure.  The later part gets into more detail of actually installing and configuring the system.  No matter where you are in your implementation cycle, this white paper will help you prepare for your installation/configuration.

If you are planning on integrating OAM and OIM for R2, please use Maximum Availability white paper link below.

Identity Management 11.1.2 Enterprise Deployment Blueprint

Happy Reading!

OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP

I was going to make a test post just to test our RSS feed.  However, Atul Kumar published a good introductory post today on OAM-OAAM-OIM integration.  So I figured that I would share that with you today and suggest it as a little light weekend reading.

You can find Atul's post here.