Virtual Directory Job Trends

One of the key indicators of technology and its level of entrenchment is the number of job postings looking for someone with a particular skill. It seems most people have already found indeed.com, but I wanted to use it to illustrate the trending in the virtual directory market.

First, I took a look at the virtual directory postings versus the metadirectory postings. Metadirectories are more and more becoming a thing of the past. Their provisioning rules can be complex and difficult to implement compared to the relative simplicity and agility of virtual directories. Here's the chart.



It looks like the crossover point was in the first half of 2007.

Now let's take a peek at the absolute number of job postings for the two largest virtual directory vendors: Radiant Logic Inc and Oracle.



Opportunities for both are up and down over time but increasing overall. It looks like data virtualization has a solid future.

Testing Enabled SSL Cipher Suites using OpenSSL

I recently ran into a problem where I needed to test which cipher suites were enabled for a particular server's SSL connections. More specifically, I wanted to make sure that none of the following null/anon ciphers were enabled.

SSL_RSA_WITH_NULL_MD5
SSL_RSA_WITH_NULL_SHA 
SSL_DH_anon_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 
TLS_DH_anon_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA 
SSL_DH_anon_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA 
SSL_DH_anon_WITH_DES_CBC_SHA 
SSL_DH_anon_EXPORT_WITH_RC4_40_MD5 
SSL_DH_anon_EXPORT_WITH_DES40_CBC_SHA

It turns out it this is really easy to test using the OpenSSL client via the following command.

% openssl s_client -host <HOST> -port <PORT> -cipher <CIPHER>

The cipher indicated on the command line has to match the OpenSSL name for the relevant cipher you wish to check. A full list of ciphers supported by OpenSSL along with their specification names and OpenSSL names can be found at the OpenSSL website.