Alternative Fact: Intentions Do Not Matter

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by Lisa

Alternative Fact: Kelly Ann Conway, in reference to Trump Jr scheduling a meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised damaging info on Clinton but was actually just tricked into scheduling a meeting to discuss adoptions: “Let’s focus on what did not happen in that meeting. No information provided that was meaningful. No action taken. Nothing”

Real fact: I think anyone who has contacted law enforcement officers when trying to put out a hit or got caught up in a solicitation sting can tell you … what you intended to do can be criminal even if your attempt is thwarted. It may be mitigating if he did not know who was offering damaging information about a political opponent. But in the middle of the DNC being hacked and information from the hacks being released (and the candidate specifically requesting the hackers find the deleted e-mail messages), wouldn’t you be suspicious of someone offering up damaging details about the opposition??

Kerberos Authentication on Tomcat

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by Lisa

I finally got around to testing out TomCat 8 and setting up Kerberos authentication for a “single sign-on” experience (i.e. it re-uses the domain logon Kerberos token to authenticate users). This was all done in a docker image, so the config files can be stashed and re-used by anyone with Docker.

First you need an account – on the account properties page, the DES encryption needs to be unchecked and the two AES ones need to be checked. The account then needs to have a service principal name mapped to it. That name will be based on the URL used to access the site. In my case, my site is http://lisa.example.com:8080 (SPNs don’t mind http/https or port numbers) so my SPN is HTTP/lisa.example.com … to set the SPN, run

setspn -A HTTP/lisa.example.com sAMAccountNameOfMyNewlyCreatedAccount

Then generate the keytab:

ktpass /out .\lisa.example.com.keytab /mapuser sAMAccountNameOfMyNewlyCreatedAccount@EXAMPLE.COM /princ HTTP/lisa.rushworth.us@EXAMPLE.COM /pass P@ssw0rdG03sH3r3

** Note about keytabs – there is a KVNO (key version number) associated with a keytab file. When security-related attributes on the account are changed, the KVNO is incremented. Aaaand you need a new keytab. This means you need to be able to get a new keytab if you plan on changing the account password, but it also means that tweaking account settings can render your keytab useless. Get the account all sorted (check off password never expires if that’s what you want, check off user cannot change password, etc) and then generate the keytab.

While you’re working on getting the SPN and keytab stuff sorted, get docker installed and running on your box. I use Docker CE (free) on my Windows laptop, and I’ve had to disable the firewall to allow access from external clients. I would expect a rule (esp one allowing anything to make an inbound connection to 8080/tcp!) would sort it, but I’ve always had the port show as filtered until the firewall is turned off. YMMV.

I create a folder for files mapped into docker containers (i.e. c:\docker) and sub-folders for each specific container. All of the files from TomcatKerberosConfigFiles are unzipped into that folder. The test website is named lisa.rushworth.us and is either set up in DNS or added to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on the client(s) that will access the site. And, of course, there’s a client machine somewhere logged onto the domain. You are going to need to tweak my config files for your domain.

In jaas.conf — I have debug on. Good for testing and playing around, bad for production use. Also you’ll need your SPN and keytab file name

principal="HTTP/lisa.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM"
keyTab="/usr/local/tomcat/conf/lisa.example.com.keytab"

In krb5.conf — the encryption is about the only thing you can keep. Use your hostnames and domain name (REALM). If you have multiple domain controllers, you can have more than one “kdc = ” line in the realms.

[libdefaults]
default_realm = EXAMPLE.COM
default_keytab_name = /usr/local/tomcat/conf/lisa.rushworth.us.keytab
default_tkt_enctypes = aes128-cts rc4-hmac des3-cbc-sha1 des-cbc-md5 des-cbc-crc
default_tgs_enctypes = aes128-cts rc4-hmac des3-cbc-sha1 des-cbc-md5 des-cbc-crc
permitted_enctypes = aes128-cts rc4-hmac des3-cbc-sha1 des-cbc-md5 des-cbc-crc
forwardable=true

[realms]
RUSHWORTH.US = {
kdc = exchange01.example.com:88
master_kdc = exchange01.example.com:88
admin_server = exchange01.example.com:88
}

[domain_realm]
example.com= EXAMPLE.COM
.example.com= EXAMPLE.COM

In web.xml – Roles may need to be sorted around (I’m not much of a TomCat person, LMGTFY if you want to do something with roles). Either way, the realm needs to be changed to yours

<realm-name>EXAMPLE.COM</realm-name>

Once Docker is running and the files are updated with your domain info, install the tomcat:8.0 image from the default repository. Start the container mapping all of the custom config files where they go:

docker run -detach --publish 8080:8080 --name tomcat8 --restart always -v /c/docker/tomcat8/tomcat-users.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/lisa.example.com.keytab:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/lisa.example.com.keytab:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/krb5.conf:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/krb5.conf:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/jaas.conf:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/jaas.conf:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/web.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/examples/WEB-INF/web.xml:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/context.xml:/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/examples/WEB-INF/context.xml:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/logging.properties:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/logging.properties:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/spnego-r9.jar:/usr/local/tomcat/lib/spnego-r9.jar:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/login.conf:/usr/local/tomcat/conf/login.conf:ro -v /c/docker/tomcat8/testAuth.jsp:/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/examples/testAuth.jsp:ro tomcat:8.0

A couple of useful things about Docker — the container ID is useful

C:\docker\tomcat8>docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
4e06b32e1ca8 tomcat:8.0 "catalina.sh run" 12 minutes ago Up 12 minutes 0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8888->8080/tcp tomcat8

But most commands seem to let you use the ‘friendly’ name you ascribed to the container. Running “docker inspect” will give you details about the container – including its IP address. I’ve found different images use different settings: some map to localhost on my box, some get an IP address within my DHCP range.

C:\docker\tomcat>docker inspect tomcat8 | grep IPAddress
"SecondaryIPAddresses": null,
"IPAddress": "172.17.0.2",
"IPAddress": "172.17.0.2",

Since this is an image that maps to localhost on my box, I need the lisa.example.com hostname to resolve to my laptop’s IP address. For simplicity, I did this by editing the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.

Shell into the container:

docker exec -it tomcat8 bash

Update your packages and install the kerberos client utilities:

root@4e06b32e1ca8:/usr/local/tomcat/conf# apt-get update
root@4e06b32e1ca8:/usr/local/tomcat/conf# apt-get install krb5-user

Then test that your keytab is working:

root@4e06b32e1ca8:/usr/local/tomcat/conf# kinit -k -t ./lisa.example.com.keytab HTTP/lisa.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM
root@4e06b32e1ca8:/usr/local/tomcat/conf# klist
Ticket cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_0
Default principal: HTTP/lisa.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM

Valid starting Expires Service principal
07/08/2017 18:27:38 07/09/2017 04:27:38 krbtgt/EXAMPLE.COM@EXAMPLE.COM
renew until 07/09/2017 18:27:38

Assuming you don’t get errors authenticating using the Kerberos client utilities, try accessing the TomCat site. I’ve added a testAuth.jsp file to the examples webapp – it shows the logon method, user name, and what roles they have:

09-Jul-2017 15:42:55.734 FINE [http-apr-8080-exec-1] org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SpnegoAuthenticator.authenticate Unable to login as the service principal
java.security.PrivilegedActionException: GSSException: Defective token detected (Mechanism level: GSSHeader did not find the right tag)

Verify that your SPN is set to the same name being used to access the site. I’m not sure why the configured service principal name doesn’t supersede the user-entered hostname. But I got nothing but auth failures until I actually entered the hostname into my hosts file and used an address that matches the service principal name.

Legalese

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by Lisa

So Trump Jr admits that he wanted to have a meeting to get damaging information about Clinton from a Russian attorney but got suckered into talking about adoptions. Sounds bad, but does it count as colluding with a foreign country to undermine a political opponent if you fail spectacularly?

Pressure Washer

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by Lisa

We got a pressure washer a few days ago. I don’t like using herbicides on the patio (well, I don’t like using them in general), but keeping the brick free of weeds is an inundating task. We’ve got some vinyl that needs to be cleaned anyway, and found a really good deal on a 2000 psi Ryobi pressure washer.

Tested it out to see if it works well and to see how clean ‘stuff’ gets with just water. Wow! I don’t know if the patio bricks have ever been cleaned. I thought they were a darker colour, but it turns out they were just REALLY grubby. It’s a messy and time consuming process – I’m planning to wear my safety glasses when I finish it up because even low velocity sand in the eyeball … not fun. But it’s a lot of fun too (tiring and ironically dehydrating, but fun). Especially when Anya wants to play in the ricocheting water like it is a sprinkler.

Here’s the difference between clean and uncleaned brick — weeds get blasted right out, dirt is cleared off the stones and from between the bricks (certainly need to get sand, between the bricks is washed clean), and nothing was used but water. We were worried about damaging the stones, but 2000 psi didn’t break anything. There was lot of mud piling up as I moved across the patio. I ended up taking a snow shovel and moving the mud off of the patio – otherwise I’d get to a point where the splash-back was making the already cleaned bits filthy again.

Once the patio is cleaned, I want to try it out on the siding and railing vinyl. Hopefully we can clean off the green stuff without detergent too.

 

Saboun Al Ghar Inspired Soap

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by Lisa

Most old civilizations have traditional artisan production processes that are hard to sustain in the modern world. Some cheeses in Southern France were sustained through government grants until EU regulations considered such support unsporting. Su filindeu pasta now only made by three people in Italy. As war ravages a country, even well sustained traditional methods become endangered. The civil/proxy war in Syria has displaced most if not all producers of صابون الغار (‘Aleppo soap’). While we may not be able to faithfully reproduce the exact process to create what may be the world’s oldest hard soap, I think it is important to preserve the knowledge of the process. The ingredients and proportions. The time and temperature of processing, how the soap is poured onto floors to cool and set whilst being walked on with wooden boards to flatten it out. How it is cut and stacked to cure.

In addition to documenting and preserving the process, derivative processes are developed to preserve some facet of the original product. Fact is, a lot of products are not protected by AOC, PDO, or any of the other “X has to be made in Y using the historic technique Z” regulations. Like the unfortunate not-Cheddar cheese that I find in many American grocery stores, Aleppo soap could be made with coconut oil and dye. And maybe that’s where the objection to cultural appropriation comes from — not an objection to someone respectfully trying to reproduce a cultural artifact but of someone bastardizing the artifact for profit or fashion. Reproducing sacred items for frivolity.

After reading about the displaced soap masters, I want to make a soap inspired by the Aleppo process. I need more experience with hot processing soap to follow the traditional long cook method, but I want to hot process the soap to control which oils comprise the superfat. Fully saponify the olive oil, then add the laurel berry oil and saponify some of it.

Then comes the actual recipe – the challenge with traditional soap recipes is that the saponification factor of ash varies. Buying sodium hydroxide yields a consistent product useful in recipes with precise measurements. Ghar soap recipes have percentages of olive oil to laurel berry oil, but more or less call for enough ash. I’m debating between five and ten percent superfat. Five percent seems fairly standard for soap recipes, so I’m leaning in that direction. But I wanted to continue researching authentic recipes before finalizing my ingredients.

Butterfly Garden

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by Lisa

We have a small pond in the back yard and a bricked in courtyard in front of the house. I am building butterfly gardens with native plants in both areas. Hopefully we’ll be able to sit in the dining room and watch butterflies hatch.

Here are the plant that I’ve ordered

Common Name Botanical Name Type
Partridge Pea Chamaecrista fasciculata Host and Nectar Plant
Showy Milkweed Asclepias Speciosa Host and Nectar Plant
Western Sand Milkweed Asclepias arenaria Host and Nectar Plant
Wild Petunia Ruellia humilis Host and Nectar Plant
Butterfly Weed Asclepias tuberosa Host Plant
Common Milkweed Asclepias syriaca Host Plant
Whorled Milkweed Asclepias verticillata Host Plant
Blue Sage Salvia Salvia azurea Nectar Plant
Cardinal Flower Lobelia cardinalis Nectar Plant
Iron Weed Vernonia altissima Nectar Plant
Orange Coneflower, Orange Black-eyed Susan Rudbeckia fulgida Nectar Plant
Purple Prairie Clover Dalea purpurea Nectar Plant
Royal Catchfly Silene regia Nectar Plant
Sweet Joe Pye Weed Eupatorium purpureum Nectar Plant
Wild Bergamot, Wild Bee Balm Monarda fistulosa Nectar Plant
Golden Alexanders Zizia aurea Host Plant
Michigan Lily Lilium michiganense Nectar Plant
Rose Milkweed Asclepias incarnata Host and Nectar Plant
Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea Nectar Plant
Wild Lupine Lupinus perennis Host Plant
Wild Senna Senna hebecarpa Nectar Plant

Making Soap Molds

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by Lisa

I want to design and print my own soap molds – special holiday bars or pre-stamped bars. We’re still working on setting up the 3d printer, so haven’t tried anything yet. I have a few downloadable soap mold forms bookmarked (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1806226/apps happens to be up in another tab now, but search thingverse for ‘soap mold’ and you will find quite a few).

The trick will be finding an appropriate filament — one that won’t melt at soaping temps (something I need to better understand) but can still be extruded at my printer temp (190-250C). Preferably a not-too-rigid filament with a little bit of flex. That’s trial and error – expensive, too, when buying whole rolls of filament. I found http://globalfsd.com/ (there’s both a US and European site) that sells small quantities of many filiments, and I’ve purchased a bunch that *seem* like they might work.

What I planned to do until I can identify a perfect filament for non-melting and easy to remove soaps is create positive forms on the 3d printer (essentially print what you want a bar of soap to look like) and then google up a procedure for making a silicon mold (uneducated guess is glop some silicon ‘stuff’ onto the positive form to create the negative silicon mold).

For anyone wanting to play with a 3d printer without dropping a couple hundred bucks on it: check your local library. Ones around here are building “maker spaces” with 3d printers, embroidery machines, engraving machines, large format printers, etc. You pay for consumables (i.e. filament in this cae) but gain familiarity with the machines before deciding to invest in one.

Logic

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by Lisa

Trump wants to help some poor baby in England who has an incurable disorder and really no hope for recovery. Of course he doesn’t want to help people with mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome by funding medical research. He doesn’t want to help Americans with any sort of disorder by ensuring they have affordable health insurance. Or, hell, a single payer system where they don’t need insurance to obtain rehabilitative medical treatments. The new American health care strategy  — develop SEO and social strategies to ensure your sad medical story gets a presidential view and thus you win medical care.

Or perhaps, profiteer that he is, Trump wants to help someone who has raised 1.7 mil come here and spend it. How much does he care about thousands of other terminal kids around the world who don’t have a couple mil to blow? Consistent with the new GOP health care plan: “make sure you have a load of cash on hand”.

I’ve long maintained that humans are not able to perform as rational actors in a free market when it comes to their health care. We may be limited by reality, but I suspect anyone who could come up with a billion dollars would be willing to spend a billion dollars to save their life. Looking at the fundraising for this kid, I realize we are not capable of performing as rational actors when it comes to other people’s healthcare either. A fact which reflects well on society, but makes any capitalistic form of medical care irrational.

More telling, he doesn’t want to subjugate his desires to expert opinion or reality. Sometimes modern medicine cannot do anything to save a person. Terribly sad fact, but still a fact. The question then becomes what measures should be taken to prolong an individual’s life. I have had older friends with DNR (do not resuscitate) orders – or more specific documented requests of what they would and would not like to be done to prolong their lives. How much money is it reasonable to spend allowing machines to breathe for someone who is effectively dead? How many people’s lives could be saved with 1.7 million dollars?! It’s these kinds of questions that make health care policy “hard”, but they need to be answered in a way that is consistent with legal frameworks and funding. Especially funding — if we value life so dearly, then we are willing to pay millions of dollars to stave off physical death for those with no hope of recovery. This means either taxes, insurance premiums, or both. Or we draw a line somewhere. And, yeah, it sucks when your loved one is on the other side of the line. But it sucks that your loved one has no hope of recovery too. There’s anger and the bastards refusing to pay for this treatment are an easy target. If we could only sustain his body for a few more decades as medical science advances …

Then agree to pay more for insurance when you are younger to balance out the pricing for older and sicker people. Or agree to cede more of your earnings for taxes that will fund all available medical care for the duration of any sick person’s artificially prolonged life. Both providing infinite care and not paying for it is not an option given the freedoms we have in this country.

Those Who Do Not Know History … Are Doomed To Revolution

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by Lisa

A facet of world history that stood out to me as a high school student was the difference a robust middle class made in the stability of a country. Lots of destitute people (aka people who don’t have much to lose) and you have lots of civil unrest, lawlessness, and insurrection. Lots of middle class people (people who aren’t rich beyond all telling, but have enough that they want to protect ‘their’ stuff), both the upper and ruling classes retain their power and resources for decades if not centuries.

I thought of this whilst reading an article about rebranding “entitlements” as “insurance” — Medicaid as insurance in case you yourself become disabled in the future. Social Security against you yourself getting old someday.

But taxes for entitlements are social stability insurance. The entire point of redistributing income is to ensure a sufficient portion of the population is happy enough that they work to preserve existing social structures.

Git

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by Lisa

I mentioned that I had inherited a Git implementation last week. Here is the documentation I created to teach my coworkers what Git is and how to use it. Some isn’t applicable outside of our environment (you won’t care about the AD groups that control access to the system), some is applicable for small non-dedicated development teams … but I figured I’d post the presentation and quick reference guide on the Internet in case it was useful to someone else.

Background:

Git is a system that provides version control for files – we’re using it to control script/program code versions (source control management), but I could put this document in Git and use the version control to manage edits to the document. You can use it to maintain configuration files – allowing config changes to be traceable. You could use it as a cookbook if you were so inclined – a chef tinkering with a recipe might be interested in going back a few versions and trying something else.

Git provides some functionality that is redundant to other systems – you could, for instance, import our scripts to SharePoint and make code changes within SharePoint. The individual replacing the file is recorded. If a previous version is needed, SharePoint maintains previous versions that can be recovered. Why use Git instead of SharePoint? Git makes it easier to have multiple developers working on a program, including functions to “merge” the edited files together. You can have different versions of the whole project – in SharePoint, I can see different versions of each file, but I have no way of correlating which version of file x.cs goes with y.h … which makes the versioning less useful. The inverse is also true — I’m speaking about git as a source code management platform, but we use it to maintain configuration files too. There are even less IT/source control uses for git out there — anything where tracking who changed what when is valuable could leverage git.

If you want the history, LMGTFY 🙂 Or, you know, read WikiPedia. LT;DR: It’s one of Torvalds’s projects, initially used for Linux kernel development and has since become a widely adopted source control management platform. If you have ever looked at a project on GitHub, you have seen a little bit of Git. GitHub is a massive, public Git repository. Because Git has significant adoption within the OpenSource community, there are a lot of good documents on its internal mechanisms (https://book.git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects for example, if you are interested in how data is stored), how it is used (Google “git cheatsheet” and there are thousands of them, or full books like https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2), and oddball errors that might crop up.

Implementation

We have a Bobobo Git server using Active Directory for both authentication and authorization. The server source is available on GitHub (https://github.com/jakubgarfield/Bonobo-Git-Server) where you can see issues and be included in conversation about source updates (subscribing lets you know when new versions should be available for install).

Questions and bugs regarding the program are maintained in the GitHub issues section. The Google forum that may come up in searches is not active and was retained for history.

This brainshare is primarily to show client-side usage of the Git server. Server setup, configuration, and management is not the focus. One thing I will highlight on the server config: the groups used to provide authorization are not preexisting or nested groups. This means new team members will need to be added to the appropriate “Windstream CSG Git …” group to use the server.

<add key=”ActiveDirectoryMemberGroupName” value=”Windstream CSG Git Users” />

<add key=”ActiveDirectoryTeamMapping” value=”VDI=Windstream CSG Git VDI,SharePoint=Windstream CSG Git SharePoint, Directory Design=Windstream CSG Git Directory Design”/>

<add key=”ActiveDirectoryRoleMapping” value=”Administrator=Windstream CSG Git Admins” />

The above snippet is from the Web.config file located on the server at F:\inetpub\www\CSG – if new groups need to be added to the Git server, that is where the magic happens.

Some Terminology:

A repository is a storage location. It can store one file, it could be a whole bunch of files that make up a single program (e.g. the CSOCheck Visual Studio project), it could be a bunch of independent programs that have similar purposes (e.g. ‘Provisioning’ that holds all our provisioning scripts). A repository could be all our code glommed into one place (don’t do this – it makes maintaining an individual program more difficult).

A branch is another server-hosted copy of the project. You don’t want to directly edit the in-use production code (we do but this is certainly not a programming best practice!) – a branch is a copy on which development is done. Once development has been completed, the branch is merged back into the master copy. Looking at Git with small projects and a small number of developers, I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of branches on a project. A large program with a lot of dedicated developers may have some break/fix branches as well as longer term feature enhancement branches.

A fork is a personal copy of a repository. In OpenSource development, forks avoid making changes in someone else’s repository. You create your fork, work within your copy, then offer the changes in your fork for inclusion in the project. We don’t have much need to create forks — we would create a branch within the project.

Project – Bonobo does not seem to have projects, but other Git implementations do. A  project includes the repository, an issues log, pull requests, and sometimes even a Wiki for the application. If you see someone referring to a project, for us that is just the repository.

The project maintainer is the individual who “owns” the project – this isn’t a project sponsor (a non-tech individual who owns a business relationship) but a technical supervisor for the development work who may also have project sponsor define-requirement type roles. The maintainer decides if changes and features are added. You can suggest changes or features – in OpenSource projects, review the existing issues to see if the feature was already requested (and make a new issue to request the feature if one does not exist) before spending a lot of time working on code that will not be accepted. Your idea may be something people are excited to see included in the project. Or it may be something they don’t want (you can always make a fork and add the feature to your iteration of the project). Even a bugfix – your proposed solution may be accepted. Or there may be a reason the maintainer wants to use a different approach to the issue. We do not have project maintainers.

Commit – this is basically making changes to the branch (add a file, delete a file, or modify a file). A commit should represent a single change. By that, I don’t mean every time you change a line, make a commit. You may well have to update a hundred lines of code across five different files to resolve an issue or implement a feature. But it’s just *one* issue or feature being implemented in the commit. You shouldn’t have a commit that implements SSL encryption in LDAP authentication and allows individuals to approve requests for direct reports. These two things have nothing to do with each other, even if they happen to be the two cards you’ve worked on today.

Commit messages associated with commits where you can indicate what is being changed in the commit. A “good” commit message is like well commented code – don’t provide too much info like “I added XYZ to line 81 on file abc.def, but don’t write “Bug fixes” either. A commit message should convey what has been changed without someone having to diff the versions (i.e. saves time). In more formal software development, commit messages also aid in the creation of release notes. Something like “Changed new user template to include ourOrgPerson objectClass” provides enough detail that we can tell what the commit did – if someone wants to find out what lines got edited, they can diff the files and tell. You can view the commit history in the web site or by using “git log”.

Push is the process of updating the server repository with changes you have made on your local repository.

Pull Request is a term you may encounter when reading Git documentation or participating in GitHub. The request basically clue someone into the fact you’ve got code to be reviewed or integrated into an upstream branch. The project maintainer would, once the changes had been reviewed and agreed upon, merge the feature into the repository and close the pull request. This is not a process we are following, nor are code-related discussions or issue lists tracked within the Git server.

Deploy – once the pull request has been approved, you can deploy and test the changes. If the changes do not work, you roll back by re-deploying the existing master.

Merge is used to combine an individual’s local repository with a server-housed copy of the branch or to combine two branches.

GitHub is an Internet based Git repository used by a lot of people and a lot of OpenSource projects. Projects are publicly readable (well, projects held in free accounts. There’s an add-on fee that allows you to maintain private projects). Yes, we could just get Git enterprise licenses and use the hosted service. We elected to deploy an internally hosted and maintained server.

Process Flow:

In a simple development environment like we have (we’re not dedicated programmers working on enormous applications), branches are straightforward. We’ve got a master for a project. When we encounter a problem, or wish to expand functionality, we make a working branch. Sort the issue or add the feature, commit. Deploy and test the code, then merge your working branch back into master.

If there is only one person working on a project at a time, merge conflicts are not really a thing. We don’t have ten different branches, we don’t have branches from branches (e.g. a branch for implementing external authentication which then has a branch for LDAP, DB table, and external authentication providers. Then the external authentication provider branch has a branch for Facebook, .NET, and Google authentication providers.). When you have a tree full of branches, you need to resolve merge conflicts (pick which change makes it) before you can merge your pull request branch.

A lot of “how to use Git” is process-related and not technical how-to stuff. Questions like “what are your software development lifecycle management processes?” and “What are your criterion for creating a new branch?”

When I worked with full-time developers, we created an “EmerStaging” branch for development on critical incidents and a “DevStaging” branch for development on non-critical incidents. The EmerStaging branch was only intended to be around for a few days – the branch would start out identical to the master, whatever big deal issue would be sorted, then the branch merged back into the master. These changes would then be sync’d down to all other branches (we don’t want the bug to impact development or, worse, to be reintroduced as someone merges in their long-term development project). The DevStaging branch was always present – there’s always a backlog of lower priority bug-fix type stuff to be done – and the project maintainer would ensure the downstream branches were updated when they processed pull requests. In addition to these break/fix branches, a new branch existed for the long-term development work – next version application or specific new features that had not been assigned to a specific release iteration.

Our environment is not so complex – we should be able to get by with one development branch when there is active development on a project and only the master branch when changes are not being made. Following this process, we avoid the challenges of synchronizing and merging multiple branches and sub-branches.

The Git Client

Simply put, a Git client puts files on the local disk and pushes those files back to the server. The first step is getting a git client installed. The examples I am showing today are using the CLI utilities from https://git-scm.com/download/win simply because I already use them at home (it’s the version . Yes, there are other git clients. Lots. If you have used a different client that you prefer, go for it. Different clients will not corrupt a repository.

Some IDE’s have Git integration – their own Git client – it may or may not work with our implementation (some are specific to GitHub / GitHub Enterprise which is not the same thing). If you are using an IDE, it may be convenient to research integrating your IDE directly with Git. There is no need – you can use the command line utilities to retrieve files, switch over to the IDE for your development work, and then use the command line utilities to add, commit, and merge your changes.

To install the Git-SCM clients, download and run the installer. Selecting the defaults on the installation are sufficient – although if you do not have the Win32 port of the GNU utilities, you can select the third option to get grep and such in DOS.

Once the installation completes, grab the two files from \\CWWAPP695\c$\Program Files\Git\mingw64\ssl\certs and put them into your install path\git\mingw64\ssl\certs folder (I renamed the existing ones, but there’s no reason not to delete them). If you see the error “SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate”, re-read the last sentence and try again.

Identify a folder on your computer into which you want to clone projects. You can store different projects in distinct locations or you can have a top-level folder in which all your projects are housed.

Creating A New Repository

Log into https://csggit.windstream.com using your Active Directory username and password (no need to specify domain). Repositories are sorted into groups – a group may be a single application project. For example, “AD Password Filter”. A group may contain several different application projects – for example, “Auth Samples”.

To create a new repository, click the big blue button in the upper right-hand corner that says exactly that. Provide a name for the repository – this cannot contain spaces, but should be descriptive enough that people do not need to actually read through the code to see what the program does. I am making a project called “HelloWorld” because … tradition.

Supplying a group name will sort the repository into a group on that first page – please do this, even if your group is your program. Otherwise it’s like creating all of your files in one folder … fine for a small number of files, but quickly difficult to look at. We may want to make a Misc group to hold oddball one-off programs.

The description field provides a place for freeform text describing the purpose of the program. This doesn’t have to be long, but it would be nice to have something. We can consider adding the server(s) to which the code is deployed – that would provide a quick way to list our scripts, what they do, and where they run.

Contributors can clone, push, and pull a repository. Administrators are additionally able to edit the repository details (i.e. change the stuff we’re putting in here now) and delete the repository.

Select the team(s) which will need to access the repository. Disclaimer – most of my experience with Git is at home using a GitLab server. There are only two of us, so permissioning isn’t really a concern. Not sure exactly how secure this is (i.e. if I don’t select Directory Design, can they still view the source but cannot write to it? Do they not even see the repository? I’d not interested enough to get another ID and add it into the security group, but if someone wants to test now … that would be cool.). Click ‘Create’ and the repository will be created.

Look near the top of the page – there will be a hyperlink to go to the new repository. Click that.

We will need the “General Url” as we begin working with the repository (i.e. copy the link address now).

Working With Your Repository

Now that you have a project and URL, clone the project to your local repository – if this is a new project, ignore the warning. If this is a project you expect to have some existing content … well, don’t ignore the error:

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git>git clone https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

Cloning into ‘LJR’…

warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.

 

If you are using the Git credential manager, you will be asked to authenticate to the server the first time you clone a repository. You do not need to specify the domain. When you change your password, you can use the Windows Credential Manager to edit your stored credential.

Once the connection has been authenticated, the client will clone the repository and volia, we have stuff

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>dir

Volume in drive D is Data

Volume Serial Number is FA7B-B3E4

 

Directory of D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR

 

06/26/2017  02:33 PM    <DIR>          .

06/26/2017  02:33 PM    <DIR>          ..

0 File(s)              0 bytes

2 Dir(s)   9,644,441,600 bytes free

 

OK, that wasn’t a whole lot of stuff – it just created a folder for my application! Make some files in there – that may mean using the folder as your IDE project location. It may mean using notepad and making a new file. Whatever your approach, make a new file and add some code.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>notepad helloworld.pl

Then add the new file(s) to the local git repository – important bit here, we are currently making changes to our copy. If you check the server, it is still an empty project.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git add *

The * is a wildcard – if you are working on a larger project, you can add just the files you are updating (i.e. I could use git add helloworld.pl here). I used the wildcard here because a lot of people like the convenience. Personally, I always recommend programmers add by name to ensure they are adding the proper ‘stuff’ to the project. There are other short-cut add options: git add . will stage new and modified files (not deletions), git add -u will stage modified and deleted files, and git add -A will stage all files.

Then commit – since this is the first file, I am not using a great commit note. Generally I’ve recommended making the first commit note a link to the requirements document … basically if I wanted to find out why we’ve got this program and what it is meant to do, where do I go? In our case, this might be an INC # or a SharePoint URL. Or it might just be a freeform text like “Provision DMZAD group memberships from acildsdb:OSR2.CWSODMZTable”.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git commit -m “Created project”

[master (root-commit) 7a66c68] Created project

1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

create mode 100644 helloworld.pl

 

Check the web view to see what’s in the project: nothing. Push the changes:

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push

Counting objects: 3, done.

Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 256 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.

Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

* [new branch]      master -> master

I mentioned earlier that making updates in the master branch is not a best practice … the first time around is an exception … there’s no production implementation that you’re going to bugger up. Now that we’ve got a project that’s running in production (pretend), we’ll make a branch when we want to make changes. Check out the branch – this changes your git ‘context’ to the new branch.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git branch newEdits

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git checkout newEdits

Switched to a new branch ‘newEdits’

Yes there is a shortcut to doing this – “git checkout -b newBranchName”. Push the new branch

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push origin newEdits

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

* [new branch]      newEdits -> newEdits

 

Make some more changes and add the changed file(s) to the local repo

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>notepad helloworld.pl

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git add helloworld.pl

Commit the changes and push to the server:

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git commit -m “Added international support”

[newEdits 28365d9] Added international support

1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push origin newEdits

Counting objects: 3, done.

Delta compression using up to 2 threads.

Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.

Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 335 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.

Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

7a66c68..28365d9  newEdits -> newEdits

 

Now if you look @ the repository browser on the web site, https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/Repository/LJR/newEdits/Blob/helloworld.pl, you will see the additions we’ve made. Add some more and repeat the process.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>notepad helloworld.pl

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git commit -m “Added Swedish and Hungarian greetings”

[newEdits b2cbedd] Added Swedish and Hungarian greetings

1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

 

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push origin newEdits

Counting objects: 3, done.

Delta compression using up to 2 threads.

Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.

Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 340 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.

Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

28365d9..b2cbedd  newEdits -> newEdits

Now look at repository explorer and see how the history is tracked – look @ each commit (notice the commit messages and who made the changes). Click into previous version and see how the differences are tracked.

Fast Forward Merging:

This is possible for simple projects like we’re using – there is a master, a branch for changes, then that branch gets collapsed back into the master when the changes have been finished.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git checkout master

Switched to branch ‘master’

Your branch is up-to-date with ‘origin/master’.

 

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git merge newEdits

Updating 7a66c68..08931d5

Fast-forward

helloworld.pl | 12 +++++++++++-

1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

 

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push origin master

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

7a66c68..08931d5  master -> master

 

Check web site – you’ll see your changes in master. But newEdits branch is still there.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git branch

* master

newEdits

My recommendation is to collapse the branch (delete it) when you have completed your changes. Otherwise you need to manage branches and merges. If there’s a need for multiple branches of sustained development … that’s beyond the scope of a quick brain share. You can find information on more complex merging operations, including conflict resolution (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging#_basic_merging) and rebasing (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Rebasing). Google can also tell you the ongoing debate about etiquette around creating new branches, merging, and rebasing.

To delete a branch once development has been completed and the changes have been merged into master:

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git push origin –delete newEdits

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/LJR.git

– [deleted]         newEdits

 

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\LJR>git branch -d newEdits

Deleted branch newEdits (was 08931d5).

Notice the commit history / notes were copied from the newEdits branch into the master, so we haven’t lost anything by merging our branch into the master.

Your local repository is not automatically updated with changes other people commit to the project. A pull retrieves changes pushed by others to the Git server. Alternately , fetch and merge operations to download the changes and play those changes into your local repository.

Since we are not full-time developers, we might opt not to persistently store projects locally (i.e. we have a specific program that needs to be updated, clone the repository locally, perform the edits, push and merge these edits, then destroy the local copy). Provided two people are not simultaneously working on the same project, the newly cloned project is up-to-date each time you start working on a program.

Stashing Changes

If you are working on a particular branch but not yet ready to commit your changes – and you have a need to work on some else in the previous commit – use “git stash save” to table the changes you’ve currently made. Make whatever changes you need to make, add those changes, commit them, and then use “git stash pop” to return the tabled changes.

Getting Rid Of Stuff

The first question is should you remove something? We often keep old code around for future reference (you want to do something similar, instead of re-writing the whole thing … copy this old program and tweak it for the current need). But leaving every old bit of code in the repository is a bit like never deleting an e-mail message or document on disk … eventually you’ll have a big mess of useless stuff that you’re looking through and backing up.

You could change the repository group to “Archive” (or “zzArchive” so it sorts to the bottom of the web view) – this would retain the code but sort it out into a different logical container to identify it as no longer used code.

Some companies will set up a second Git server dedicated to archive – lower I/O requirements on hardware, not frequently backed up, etc. Old code is pushed up to the archive server and then deleted from the active code server. As we don’t currently have an archive Git server, this isn’t an option. But it is a possibility if inactive code that we want to keep becomes burdensome. Other companies archive the code outside of Git and delete the project from the repository.

To remove a file from the repository, use “git rm filename.xtn”. To remove a repository, you can click the little rubbish can next to the project on the web site.

There is no such thing as removing a group – as soon as no repositories exist in the group, it will disappear from the web view.

A Note On Binary Files

The typical solution to storing large binary files in Git is to implement LFS – this feature  is not yet supported in Bonobo. As such, avoid storing binary files in Git (media, compiled binaries, compressed data).

Binary files tend to be large. Because of the distributed nature of Git, large files are transmitted and stored a lot of places. Frequently changing binary files bloat the server database too. This isn’t to say you cannot store binary files – just that it is a judgement call. Smaller and more static files, great. Three gig files that get updated daily … find another solution.

Many types of binary files do not compress well – especially already compressed files. You can disable delta compression in .gitattributes (*.mp4 binary -delta) to avoid the I/O of attempting to compress already-compressed data.

When merging binary files, diff just tells you they are different. Not particularly illuminating information if you are manually resolving merge conflicts. For non-text files, there may be a filter that allows changes to be represented in a readable format (e.g. Microsoft Word documents) by setting an appropriate filter in .gitattributes (*.docx diff=word). The diff would not include format changes (i.e. if I bolded a specific sentence, that would not be apparent in the diff), but it will display text content that has been updated.

Remote Repositories

The whole point of Git is distributing copies of the repository elsewhere. It is possible to use Git locally – this would allow a single developer to track and revert changes – but typical implementations have multiple developers pulling from and pushing to a remote repository.

You can have more than one remote repository.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\PKIWeb>git remote -v

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (fetch)

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (push)

You may notice that we have the word origin in some of the commands – this is a default repository created when we clone the branch. You can add additional remote repositories (the example I am using is silly since they are the same location). This could be done to transfer a project to a different repository (moving an out-of-support product to an archive Git server or an acquired company moving repositories into the new company’s repository) or to pull a project from an alternate location (other users who maintain their own project for the same application).

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\PKIWeb>git remote add ljr https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\PKIWeb>git remote -v

ljr     https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (fetch)

ljr     https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (push)

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (fetch)

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (push)

Normally there’s no need for us to do this (i.e. don’t maintain your own copy of a project, create a branch in the existing one!), except if our project is derivative work of an opensource project that we need to publish externally. You could have both the internal Git server and GitHub registered as repositories. Make your changes and do “push origin” as well as “push whateverYouCallGitHub”.

You can also “fetch origin” and “fetch whateverYouCallGitHub”, but to avoid confusion, I would use the internal Git server as the authoritative repository (anyone else in the group may be editing the code) and only push to GitHub.

When you no longer need a remote repository, you can remove it.

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\PKIWeb>git remote rm ljr

 

D:\tempCSG\ljr\Git\PKIWeb>git remote -v

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (fetch)

origin  https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/PKIWeb.git (push)

README

If you participate in GitHub projects, you will notice a README.md file at the root of projects. This is a standard place to include documentation (hence the name), but it is also rendered out in the Git server web site. For an example, see the AD Password Filter project (https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/Repository/ADPasswordFilter/master/Tree). If there is not a convenient external reference for the initial commit notes, you may want to consider including program documentation in the README.md file.

What if the changes don’t work?

One nice Git feature is undoing changes. The first thing you need to know is that commits have ID numbers (often called a SHA in documentation). You can find that using “git log” or by looking at the web site.

If the changes are local but haven’t been committed to the server, just reset your local copy: git reset –hard ID#

If the changes haven’t been merged into the master branch yet (i.e. you clone your dev branch to the script server, test it … then realize that won’t work), use the git revert functions. First find the commit ID. Then use “git revert ID#” and git will create a commit that is the inverse of the commit specified (it undoes whatever the commit does). Don’t forget to push this revert back to the server.

If the problem is just the commit message, you can modify the message (i.e. remove a typo): git commit –amend -m “This is my new commit message”

You can temporarily revert to a specific commit version (say, to see if the problem you are having was introduced in this version) using “git checkout ID#”. If you intend to make changes from the old state, use “git checkout -b previousState ID# ” to create a new branch from that point.

Ingesting Existing Code

Create the repository. In the directory with your existing code, initialize the directory as a git repository. Add all files to the local repository and commit the initial file load.

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git init

Initialized empty Git repository in D:/Scripts/ljl/wincare-oud/.git/

 

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git add *

 

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git commit -m “Uploading existing code to project”

[master (root-commit) 231bafa] Uploading existing code to project

2 files changed, 76 insertions(+)

create mode 100644 _simulateWincare.pl

create mode 100644 res.txt

 

Add a remote location repository (you can use “git remote -v” to confirm the repository has been added) and push the local repository to the remote

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git remote add origin https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/WinCareOUDTesting.git

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git push origin master

Counting objects: 4, done.

Delta compression using up to 2 threads.

Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.

Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 1.06 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.

Total 4 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)

To https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/WinCareOUDTesting.git

* [new branch]      master -> master

But wait …

We’ve got a whole bunch of code written and stashed somewhere … but how does that deploy it? It doesn’t. For compiled code, there would be a build process that follows the commits. Someone like a build manager (or an automated process) takes the updated source code, compiles it, hands it off for testing (may be manual testing by QA people or may be an automated test program), then supplies the compiled binaries for release or deployment.

With our interpreted code, using Git is a process change. Instead of going to the task server, copying the script file to something-ljr.xtn, editing my copy, testing, then moving my copy back to something.xnt – we would branch the master for development, clone the development branch to our workstation or elsewhere on the terminal server, make changes, test, commit and push those changes, then merge the development branch back into master.

Once the branch has been merged into master, use git on the task server to integrate changes. (The shortcut below can also be done as “git fetch origin master” and “git merge master”). I am assuming that fast-forward merges can be done.

D:\Scripts\ljl\wincare-oud>git pull origin master

From https://csggit.windstream.com/CSG/WinCareOUDTesting

* branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD

Updating 231bafa..202da14

Fast-forward

_simulateWincare.pl | 10 +++++++++-

1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

On next script execution, the updated code will be used.

Etiquette

There are guidelines to contributing to OpenSource projects (https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/) – if you will be working on public projects, read the guidelines and engage with the other developers. Individual projects may have their own guidelines – Git itself is an OpenSource project on GitHub, but pull requests with the obvious repository (named Git) are ignored.

Here, we all know each other … if you see a ticket that requests a new column in a report or a different format for an export, make a development branch, sort the issue, test it, and merge the development branch back into master.

There is one part of the OpenSource guidelines that produce more readable code when multiple individuals are contributing: coding standards. Software development teams have formal documents that define all manner of form within their coding. How to name variables. Are spaces or newlines used before braces? Are spaces used before parenthesis? How are functions named? What does a program or function comment block look like? How are variable and function names cased? When looking at OpenSource projects – or our internal team code – there isn’t a single coding standard. In the absence of a company-supplied standard, most individuals have one of their own. From a class, from a previous job … something.

Some people prefix variable names with type indicators (in statically cast language, you’ve got to search up to the variable declaration otherwise). Some people appreciate concise code and write if(x == y){ doWhatever; } all on one line, others would consider that hopelessly unreadable. Some people use switch statements, some hate them and would rather long-form the if/elseif/else version. If you are making a quick change (+2 needs to be +4 or some word was misspelt), you don’t need to review the code to see how it is written. Anything beyond a quick edit, it is polite to look at how the project maintainer (or original author in our case) has written the code and follow their form.