Practical Tips To Stay Focused In An Ever Distracting Environment

The companies are increasingly adapting Agile methodology, Continuous Integration and Development process to make the delivery efficient.  There is also a noticeable increase of productivity among the developers.  The management expectation has gone up and this creates a quite a bit of stress  on engineers to keep the pace. Staying focused on finishing one logical task becoming increasingly challenging for Lead Engineers when they handle multiple modules with a baggage of supporting many of their previous projects.

Here are few practical tips on staying focused on your high priority tasks.

1. Start your day addressing the Critical item only , not reading the email :-
Many of us starts our day going through the new emails and replying them.  I will suggest spending first two hours of your day addressing the P1 items like :-

• Any P1 follow-up items from yesterday. Note that you will use the email only for this purpose, not reading the new emails.
• Any P1 technical issues/ code you are working on.

This will give you a grip over all P1 items.  Reading new emails will distract you to new set of works, rather address the issues that bothering you.


2. Allocate specific time for new email :- 
So when should you read your new emails? Allocate two specific times in a day for new emails and replying them. For example :-

• Around 10am, two hours after you finish your critical items. 
• Again at 4pm, before winding down. Now you may have a TO-DO list for tomorrow from these emails.

3. Dealing with too many emails :- 
A very simple solution for this is to apply effective email-filter, so only the relevant email stays on the top.  All enterprise email program comes with filter utilities.
Here are some filter examples :-

• All emails where you are CCed should goes to "NotToMe" folder . The reason is obvious, you don't have to reply it immediately.
• We receives tons of email system generated email like, "server xxxx restarted", "The Certificate xxx is about to expire", etc.  Carefully choose these regular emails that belongs to trash. 
• Put a similar filter to all regular blah..blaha email straight to trash.
• Create sub folder for different subcategories.  For example anything coming from Jira should go to Jira subfolder.

Building a custom list of  email-filter will take time as it need constant adjusting. But this is one of the most critical tools that helps you avoid wasting time on non critical items.


4. Block few hours for Technical works :- 
The Senior Engineers spend more time on co-ordination and techno clerical work, thus loosing the focus on core technical work.  The best way to address this issue is block at least 16 to 20hrs of your calendar for development work.


5. Everything has a home :- 
Many external factor helps you stay focused.  Few examples could be :- A clean desk, decluttered workspace, clean email box etc.  How to have a clean desk ?  I got this key take away statement "Everything has a hone"  from a time-management training. Any object lies on your desk should have a home. The home could be a paper tray, drawer, book shelves, trash can etc.  Same goes for email.  Every email has a home (a rule based folder) .

6. Continuous Planning :- 
This is mostly applicable to Senior / Lead engineers who are very often face the questions like when it will be done? Why it is not done? What taking so much of time ? What is the estimation ? and so on .. So continuous planning is THE critical task, that will provide you the tool that will help you answering these questions.

Some useful tips on planning tools :-

• TO-DO list for the Month/ Quarter - Use tools like a formula based planning spreadsheet or Jira structure that will be handy in getting a near perfect report on the project status. Particularly, the number of remaining-hours required for your project stories. At-least 2 hrs a week need to be spend in updating the story detail. Usually I reserve 2 hrs every alternative Friday. 
• Ensure that your Monthly plan match the road map time line done by your manager. 
• TO-DO list for the Week :- Maintain a sticky note or a working journal for listing every-days TO-DO list.  This takes only 10 mins and can be done in the morning.  Plan your day around this weekly TO-DO list.

Conclusion :- 
I learned these over the years working in a very demanding environment.  I try my best to stick to these rules, though I just do fire fighting in some of the chaotic days. These tips are not new to many of you.  Love to hear your experience on dealing with distractions and how to stay focused. 

Mistaking Kerberos as Single Sign On

End users often misinterpret the Kerberos authentication mechanism to mean Single Sign-On (SSO) in corporate world.  Kerberos authentication provides seamless sign on to (web) applications by using the Kerberos ticket generated/ refreshed during the user’s authentication to the network (when user first login to the computer).

For example, if web applications AppX and AppY are configured for Kerberos authentication, the user will not see any credential challenge when both of these apps are accessed in two different tabs of same browser. This gives the impression of SSO between AppX and AppY.

The SSO functionality is much broader in any in premises Enterprise SSO infrastructure like OAM, SiteMinder, ForgeRock. The Kerberos mechanism is just one of several Authentication schemes available in SSO server.  The Other authentication scheme like Form Authenticaiton can also provide single sign on between two different web apps thru a secure cookie generated by sso server when user first login thru the Form in a Web-Agent based SSO architecture.  

OAM R2 Persistent Login (Keep Me logged In/ Remember Me) Set up

I remember struggling with this one in OAM R1.  Since this feature was not available in R1, we implemented this by our own custom code.  Finally this is available in R2.  Here is the link (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E40329_01/admin.1112/e27239/getstarted.htm#CIHBEEAI) to set this up and test in 30 minutes max.

I am just posting the 1st step of exact WLST command taht I ran to enable it in OAM 11g R2.  Follow the rest of the steps from Oracle doc


$ cd ../Middleware/Oracle_IDM1/common/bin
$ ./wlst.sh

wls:/YOUR_DOMAIN/serverConfig> connect()
Please enter your username :weblogic
Please enter your password :
Please enter your server URL [t3://localhost:7001] :t3://YourServer:7001
Connecting to t3://YourServer:7001 with userid weblogic ...
Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to YOUR_DOMAINr'.

wls:/YOUR_DOMAIN/serverConfig> configurePersistentLogin(enable="true", validityInDays="30",maxAuthnLevel="2", userAttribute="obPSFTID")
SUCCESS

wls:/YOUR_DOMAIN/serverConfig> exit()

Including Custom MANIFEST.MF File in NetBeans jar Building Process

OAM custom authentication module requires a custom manifest.mf file to be included in your custom plugin jar file. It is is easy to include your own manifest.mf file during jar building process in eclipse. But it not that easy if you are using Netbeans .  If you do a clean build using Netbeans, you will end in having a default manifest.mf file in the jar file.

Here are the steps to include your OAM plugin specific manifest.mf file in the jar.
(1)  Keep your custom manifest.mf file in /src/META-INF/ directory.
(2) Open /YourProject/nbproject/project.properties
comment this line
#manifest.file=manifest.mf

add this two lines that will do the magic
manifest.available=true 
manifest.file=${src.dir}/META-INF/manifest.mf 

(3) Now do a NetBean build, the generated jar file should have "/src/META-INF/manifest.mf" included already.

Japanese (non-ASCII) Character Issues in OAM headers variable

I have few user records with Japanese character (like 高山) in their attributes. Querying these users in OVD through ODSM displays it correctly . However, the same attributes when passed as OAM header variable through OAM-Authorization-Scheme spit out garbage like '=?UTF-8?B?6auY5bGx?=' .

This happens because the Webgate will encode any non-ASCII characters in header variables according to RFC 2047. It is the receiving OAM-protected application that will decode the encoded characters. The following java sample code will be a quick rescue. This will transform the non-ASCII character to a readable one.
:
import javax.mail.internet.MimeUtility ;
System.out.println("The Actual Value is := " + MimeUtility.decodeText("=?UTF-8?B?6auY5bGx?=")) ;
:

Your result will be =
The Actual Value is := 高山

Always Mark Your OAM Cookie as Secure and HttpOnly

It is a good practice to mark all OAM cookie as Secure and Http-only. This can be done in individual authentication scheme. The exact OAM-11g-R1 syntax is "ssoCookie=Secure;httponly" in Challenge-Parameters field.

httponly :- By marking the cookie as httpOnly, you are ensuring that the cookie can only be used for http protocol. It is not accessible via non-HTTP methods like JavaScript ("document.cookie"). Usually hackers can steal cookies via cross-site scripting.

Secure :- This configuration limit the cookie transmission thru the encrypted(https) channel only. This is an additional security on the top of httponly configuration.

Resolving OIF Error "FED-15132: Unknown refID" when JSP based form login is used for OAM authentication

The Issues :- 

My OIF server is integrated with OAM for authentication. I used a JSP based form login to collect credential when User makes an IntitateSSO call. I started seeing this error in OIF logs. This is very much reproducible in clustered OAM and OIF servers.

FED-15132: Unknown refID
Cause: User previously accessed the Oracle Identity Federation server with a different host name than the one in the current request and cookies were not transmitted.
Action: Use the same hostname and fully qualified domain URL to access the Oracle Identity Federation 

FED-15128: An internal error occurred while processing the credentials Cause: The authentication engine did not return the required refID parameter.
Action: Check that the authentication flow correctly sent the refID parameter to the Oracle Identity Federation server 

Whats Going on under the hood :- 
The OIF servers is a J2EE application runs on weblogic server which creates a JSessionId. My custom jsp based form login is also another J2EE application deployed on OAM server. When this login page is invoked, it also create a JSession Id. To add a pinch of salt to this issue, I am using same load balancer address (e.g. sso.abc.com) to access multiple Weblogic applications. They all try to use the same JSessionId cookie, which is issued to domain=sso.abc.com path=/.  Now my custom form login session is clashing with OIF's session that is created inside OIF after successful authentication.

Solution :-
You may have already guessed it. Open the weblogic.xml file of you custom Login Form war file and add the followings .

<session-descriptor>
<cookie-name> MyJSessionId </cookie-name>

</session-descriptor>


Basically, you are instructing Weblogic server to create a custom JSessionId (MyJessionId) for your Form login to avoid clashing with OIF's session.