Categories
computer

Proxy Authentication Against Devise-Based Ruby Applications

(Quick GitHub link!)

My team at TGen has a Rails application using a typical devise + cancan installation for authentication and authorization, respectively, and a related Apache HTTPD proxy server we needed to authenticate against active accounts in the webapp before passing traffic to their destination, which is a single host. We tried mod_authn_dbd for a while, but the combination of Devise’s default adapive bcrypt password encryption that is not supported by mod_authn_dbd by default, a complex set of SQL statements to process the authorization directly, and that none of the existing modules seem to be able to do what we want, made it a messy ordeal.

Instead, we created devise-proxy: a simple proxy server written as Rack Middleware that you can deploy using Passenger within Apache or nginx. You simply provide devise-proxy with a config.yml file defining the hostname and port of the devise webapp to use as an authentication web service, and hostname and port of a single server to use as a forwarding target.

Clients connecting to the proxy use the email/password for their proxy username/password credentials. All authenticated clients will be forwarded to your provided host/port, but using the path in the client’s original HTTP request. Clients failing to authenticate will receive a 403 and the forwarding host will never be hit.

gem install devise-proxy # to install

git clone git://github.com/preston/devise-proxy.git # to clone!

devise-proxy is released under a BSD license via the GitHub project, here. Good luck!

Categories
computer Uncategorized

How To Custom Brand The OpenStack “Horizon” Dashboard

I’m deploying OpenStack “Essex” on Ubuntu Server 12.04, and have the openstack-dashboard package installed to provide the web-based “Horizon” GUI component newly added for the Essex release. Canonical also provides an openstack-dashboard-ubuntu-theme package that brands the Python-based Django GUI. Despite that the last major Canonical-maintained packages based on the OpenStack “Diablo” release in Ubuntu 11.10 did not include an administrative GUI, Horizon — as a standalone component — has been very stable for a mainstream debut. In the future, though, I’d like to see a quick and easy way to change the default branding to use your own logo, colors, and titles using only the GUI’s administrative screens.

The horizon documents briefly mention branding customization to give you a head start, but you probably want more specific steps. Here’s my custom-branded Horizon dashboard with custom colors, logo, and site title:

Once you know where to make the appropriate changes, it’s super simple. Step-by-step:

  1. Create a graphical logo with a transparent background. The text “TGen Cloud” in this example is actually rendered via .png files of multiple sizes I created with a graphics program. I used a 200×27 for the logged-in banner graphic, and 365×50 for the login screen graphic.
  2. Set the HTML title (shown at the top of the browser window) by adding the following line to /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py
    SITE_BRANDING = "Example, Inc. Cloud"
  3. Upload your new graphic files to:
    /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/static/dashboard/img/
  4. Create a new CSS stylesheet — we’ll call ours custom.css — in the directory:
    /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/static/dashboard/css/
  5. Edit your CSS file using the following as a starting point for customization, which simply overrides the Ubuntu customizations made in the ubuntu.css file. Change the colors and image file names as appropriate, though the relative directory paths should be the same.
    /*
    * New theme colors for dashboard that override the defaults:
    *  dark blue: #355796 / rgb(53, 87, 150)
    *  light blue: #BAD3E1 / rgb(186, 211, 225)
    *
    * By Preston Lee <plee@tgen.org>
    */
    h1.brand {
    background: #355796 repeat-x top left;
    border-bottom: 2px solid #BAD3E1;
    }
    
    h1.brand a {
    background: url(../img/my_cloud_logo_small.png) top left no-repeat;
    }
    
    #splash .login {
    background: #355796 url(../img/my_cloud_logo_medium.png) no-repeat center 35px;
    }
    
    #splash .login .modal-header {
    border-top: 1px solid #BAD3E1;
    }
    
    .btn-primary {
    background-image: none !important;
    background-color: #355796 !important;
    border: none !important;
    box-shadow: none;
    }
    
    .btn-primary:hover,
    .btn-primary:active {
    border: none;
    box-shadow: none;
    background-color: #BAD3E1 !important;
    text-decoration: none;
    }
  6. Open the following HTML template in an editor:
    /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/templates/_stylesheets.html
  7. Add a line to include your new stylesheet: (I’ve highlighted the new line in bold.)
    ...
     <link href='{{ STATIC_URL }}bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' />
     <link href='{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/css/{% choose_css %}' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' />
     <link href='{{ STATIC_URL }}dashboard/css/custom.css' media='screen' rel='stylesheet' />
    ...
  8. Restart apache just for good measure:
     sudo service apache2 restart
  9. Reload the dashboard in your browser and fine tune your CSS appropriate.

You’re done!

[ezcc]

Categories
business computer

TGen News Dashboard Widget For Mac OS X

 

Download now!

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization focused on developing clinically relevant medical diagnostics and smarter treatments related to genomic profiling. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the institute for over a year on a project related to breast cancer, and thought I’d share a widget I wrote keep you up to date on TGen’s latest news items.

The TGen News: Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X v1.1 gives you an always up-to-date set of headlines, pulled straight from the TGen news feed.

If you enjoy this widget, please donate a few dollars to the TGen Foundation and do your part to support the many causes that TGen pursues. Enjoy!

From the TGen website:

At TGen, investigators are pushing the limits of cutting-edge research and technology to discover the genetic cause of disease. Experiments that were impossible and impractical only a few years ago are now conducted every day.

Discovery fuels TGen’s translational research and lies at the heart of our scientific investigations. TGen’s research divisions are designed to foster a wide range of genetic discoveries. These divisions draw heavily upon TGen’s scientific platforms to expedite findings. TGen’s labs are staffed by teams of researchers focused on making genomic discoveries in common diseases and disorders in the areas of oncology, neurogenomics and metabolic disease.

Note: This free product is provided by Preston Lee, and is neither officially endorsed nor supported by TGen.