Adding OpenID to Wordpress allows for existing users on a domain to connect without having to manage another account. In this setup, we will be using Keycloak to provide the existing accounts which the OpenID plugin will use.

There are a few plugins for Wordpress that allow this functionality, but we will be using OpenID-Connect-Generic by Daggerhart.

Keycloak Client Setup

First step is to create a client in Keycloak. In the Keycloak web UI, create an openid-connect client by going to Clients and click Create.

When switching to root after the typical SSH with X11 forwarding enabled this error can appear:

$ X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
$ Error: Can't open display: localhost:10.0

The workaround seems to include copying the MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 from the user who ssh’d in to the root user using xauth. Here’s how:

First verify the $DISPLAY being used and list the MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 used for it :

System tray is a “legacy” tray where various applications (e.g. Nextcloud, Pidgin and Signal) have an icon with which you can interact with the application without actually opening the main application window. I said “legacy”, because phasing it out was the plan in the Gnome 3 project, but it seems like we’re not getting rid of the tray any time soon, if ever.

In any case the system tray is not enabled by default in recent Fedoras, and the proper way to enable it has changed several times in the recent past as Gnome has been upgraded. This outlines the most recent way to do it, and hopefully this one sticks for longer than a year or so.

In Terraform you have access to basic data types like bool or string. Defining the data type is a good start for starting to improve the quality of your modules. However, you may want to validate that a certain string matches a list of pre-defined options, and if not, fail validation early.

Terraform, unlike Puppet, does not have a built-in Enum data type. However, you can emulate an Enum like this:

Terraform’s remote-exec provisioner fails immediately if any command in a script exists with a non-zero exit code. This makes building polling loops a bit more involved than it normally is. So, here is an example loop that checks if a URL can be reached:

while true; do
    curl -k https://puppet:8140/puppet-ca/v1 && break || sleep 3
done

When the URL is unreachable, the “||” will ensure that “sleep” gets run, which returns 0. If the URL is reachable, curl itself will return 0 and “&&” ensures that we break out of the loop.

Sometimes you might find yourself wondering whether there is some paranormal activity going on with your keycloak and its database. To check if things are still in the realm of physical reality, and to restore your child’s faith in the programmer who never makes mistakes, it might be soothing to check what’s actually happening to the database. To do this, create a new property named showSql and give it a value of true in your connectionsJpa spi. This is located in standalone.xml, standalone-ha.xml, or in domain.xml (if you’ve already graduated from kindergarten).

In Bitbucket usernames are unique across whole of Bitbucket. Moreover, the same SSH key can only be configured for one user. If you registered your Bitbucket account using a corporate email and used your primary SSH key with it, you’re pretty much hosed if you then need to create another corporate Bitbucket account and wanted to use the same SSH key with it - that’s just not going to happen. The solution to this dilemma is to create another SSH keypair and somehow make SSH, Git and Bitbucket co-operate. As the correct solution was not immediately obvious it is documented here.

The Azure VPN Gateway supports the OpenVPN protocol (except the “Basic SKU”). Unlike, for example, the commercial Access Server, the VPN Gateway does not have a built-in certificate authority (CA) tool for managing client certificates. And client certificates are essentially a requirement if you need to support clients other than Windows and Mac, such as Linux, iOS or Android. The use of easy-rsa-old as a CA for Azure VPN Gateway is documented quite well in this blog post, but this post is about using the newer easyrsa3 instead. Basic familiarity with easyrsa3 is assumed, so we just go through the steps you’d normally take.

Terraform has good support for Microsoft Azure through the Terraform Azure provider and the AzureRM backend. However, you may hit a glitch when adding or importing resources if you lack permissions to register Azure resource providers:

│ Error: Error ensuring Resource Providers are registered.
|
│ Terraform automatically attempts to register the Resource Providers it supports
| to ensure it's able to provision resources.
│                                                                                                                                                                                   
│ If you don't have permission to register Resource Providers you may wish to use
| the "skip_provider_registration" flag in the Provider block to disable this
| functionality.
│                                                                                                                                                                                   
│ Please note that if you opt out of Resource Provider Registration and Terraform
| tries to provision a resource from a Resource Provider which is unregistered,
| then the error may appear misleading - for example
|                                                                                                                                                                                   
│ > API version 2019-XX-XX was not found for Microsoft.Foo
|                                                                                                                                                                                   
│ Could indicate either that the Resource Provider "Microsoft.Foo" requires
| registration, but this could also indicate that this Azure Region doesn't support | this API version.
|
│ More information on the "skip_provider_registration" flag can be found here:
|
│ https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs#skip_provider_registration
│
│ Original Error: Cannnot register providers: Microsoft.DataLakeAnalytics, Microsoft.DBforPostgreSQL, Microsoft.AVS, Microsoft.Media, Microsoft.ApiManagement, Microsoft.Search, Mic
rosoft.Maintenance, Microsoft.ServiceBus, Microsoft.HealthcareApis, Microsoft.Relay, Microsoft.DesktopVirtualization, Microsoft.NotificationHubs, Microsoft.SecurityInsights, Micros
oft.DBforMariaDB, Microsoft.Kusto, Microsoft.DataLakeStore, Microsoft.Automation, Microsoft.CognitiveServices, Microsoft.ManagedServices, Microsoft.EventGrid, Microsoft.BotService,

--- snip ---

At first glance this error look cryptic, but it is quite clear once you understand what Azure resource providers are - I like to think of them as “enabled Azure services” or “enabled Azure features”.

I previously wrote about takeaways from our first recruitment process as a recruiter in January 2021. This time I’m looking back to the recruitment process in order to gather tips for the other half, job applicants and seekers. Part of the advice are also based on my own experiences as a job seeker and some even on common sense. A recruiter of a bigger company could formulate this article a bit differently but these aspects mattered to us, as a small business.