Charitha's Web Log

Recently, I got an opportunity to work on a domain which is bit different from my subject matter specialization, software testing and quality assurance. I started to work as a lead of technical support team at WSO2 since November 2012. I thought to put together some key observations I made in technical support career in general and how I position it in terms of my beliefs. Willingness to help - the most important characteristic of a support engineer Are you really a helping hand regardless of your profession? How can I understand my willingness in helping others. I would simply list down some questions to evaluate your likelihood to help others. Do you get frustrated when someone requests your help? If someone asks a question, what is your initial reaction? In our life, we have seen people who do not even look at the person who requested help. Some people just route the request to some other party without even understanding what kind of help is required. If you are really a ...

The management aspects of WSO2 Carbon platform are primarily achieved through SOAP web services interface known as admin services. All Carbon products ship with a management console (front-end user interface) which communicates with these web services and provides users with various administration capabilities. In some situations, we need to by-pass the management UI and call the backend web services directly. Specially, in test automation, it is important to minimize the risk of frequent UI changes hence focusing on admin service interactions can be considered as a viable solution. WSO2 test automation framework is built upon this approach which programatically calls the backend web services to manage deployment, configuration and various other tasks. These backend web services are secured to prevent anonymous invocations. WSO2 Carbon server secures these services through multiple methodologies. For example; HTTP Basic Authentication over SSL WS-Security user...

SecureVault can be used to encrypt the plain-text passwords specified in various configurations files in WSO2 Carbon products. You can find more information about how to secure plain-text passwords using securevault in this blog written by Asela . When you use SecureVault to encrypt the passwords as explained there, you are supposed to specify the primary keystore password at the server startup. However, this is not possible when you start the server as a background process. This post summarizes the complete procedure of securing plain text passwords using secure vault and additional configurations when you start the server as a background process. Suppose, we need to encrypt the LDAP ConnectionPassword value in CARBON_HOME/repository/conf/user-mgt.xml Locate cipher-text.properties which can be found at CARBON_HOME/repository/conf/security directory  Keep a back up of the cipher-text.properties file  Now, remove all key-value pairs which have there by default in...