Nasir Naqvi's Blog

Webservd default home directory

Nasir Naqvi — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 03:05:17 +0000

Sometimes, the user on unix ‘webservd’ exists under /etc/passwd file and the home directory does not exists. It is required if you are doing some integration between servers using SSH and the webservd user. The following is a quote from http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E19316-01/820-3320/gdprq/index.html

If the runtime user of the OpenSSO Enterprise web container instance is a non-root user, this user must be able to write to its own home directory.

For example, if you are installing Sun Java System Web Server, the default runtime user for the Web Server instance is webservd. On Solaris systems, the webservd user has the following entry in the /etc/passwd file:

webservd:x:80:80:WebServer Reserved UID:/:

The webservd user does not have permission to write to its default home directory (/). Therefore, you must change the permissions to allow the webservd user to write to its default home directory. Otherwise, the webservd user will encounter an error after you configure OpenSSO Enterprise using the Configurator.

The following will address the issue:

Change the string to as follows:

webservd:x:80:80:devappa10-WebServer Reserved UID:/export/home/webservd:/bin/bash

After this, create a home directory as /export/home/webservd and copy the files from /etc/skel directory to this home directory.

Now change ownership so that home directory and its contents are owned by webservd.

chown -R webservd /export/home/webservd
chgrp -R webservd /export/home/webservd

Change password (if needed) by using command passwd webservd.

Problem should be solved as the webservd has now full access to its home directory.

Future of BPM

Nasir Naqvi — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:38:29 +0000

BPM has been into the business and IT for quite some time now and still making progress. BPM software giants like Lombardi, Appian, Global360, Pega, Savvion, etc are the few names which have made revolutionary changes in the business process modeling. The point I am discussing here is that why these BPM companies are being sold to or purchased by big companies, like IBM acquired Lombardi a month ago. Savvion is too acquired by Progress Software. Taking into the example of Oracle, a big software giant, they started with a small size company with Data Base Management System. As they progressed, they expand and brought more flexibility and enhancements in their product. Today, they have most stable DBMS systems along with many other softwares and tools including their own BPM product. Now a days, trend seems to be like companies don’t hold to themselves, even they are making good business and looking to sell themselves to more stable companies. Is this due to lack of confidence that they are afraid to loose their market value in a few months or they want to make considerable profit on-the-fly by selling them to big companies or they are becoming unstable or this is what they have planned very early?

Many IT people started feeling that BPM is a matter of next couple of years. This might be one of the reason for these BPM software companies wanted to save themselves ahead of time. Are we seeing it getting dissolved into the big sea? Is BPM delivering what it has promised or it is getting too complex for the business? Can business rely on it or there will be an emerging technology handling BPM itself in next few years?

I strongly believe that if an emerging company can hold to its base during the peak of its business and furure trend shows the product will grow, I recommend to keep it progressing. We have lots of examples like microsoft, oracle, IBM, etc that started too small and they now grow to the extent where they can aquire others.

Read this too.
http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2010/01/11/the-beginning-of-the-end-in-bpm/

SOA and its meaning to Business

Nasir Naqvi — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:49:24 +0000

Technology is a name of fast pace change in current various business environments and businesses have to be make sure that their technological implementations support the latest IT trends but only those which are absolutely needed to boost their business and more return on investments. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a latest trend which promises to solve various problems and ease of monitoring and achieve higher degree of success in different aspects in the business line.

So the question here is why companies are making SOA more prominent in everyday needs when talking about their processes. We need to think it as a Business-driven Architectural style and a full organizational structure insead of plotting it as one big entity focusing on a specific scenario. We need to think in terms of business and apply the needs by thinking IT. Business and IT collaboration is a must when climbing stairs towards a true SOA platform and it will be very hard to get the requirements necessary to drive the proper process definitions if they don’t work with each other closely. In fact, the first thing a business needs to achieve SOA is to know the enterprise and slowly modelling down the processes and their interactions. Once it it’s achieved, we can link it to the technology. All this is a deep down approach and needs to be carefully focused.

SOA is a top-down approach which means we should arrive at the problem first leading to architecture and then solution. Today, many organizations tend to announce to achieve a true SOA platform but in fact if we look closely, only few would have implemented the basis of SOA or have just started. The base problem for SOA failure in any organization lies in the fact that they look to adopt new technologies without thinking if it will benefit in their current and future business needs. This is what we call a bottom-up approach and can be a major factor for SOA failure.

Monitoring, modelling and development of business processes by utilizing various latest IT trends is the key to SOA. We can see various vendors mixing the term SOA, BPM, BAM but in fact BPM, BAM, etc are the parts of SOA. A widely used thought is to use Web Services and that it will fix all issues and will lead to a SOA platforms is completely wrong and it’s a true bottom-up approach. Broadly speaking, the path should be from the service layer to the resource layer and not opposite. It should be avoided and a thorough understanding and knowledge of business processes should be in place with IT trends to achieve SOA platform.