Before you start

About this tutorial

With the release of IBM Tivoli Access Manager (TAM) Fixpack 2 in May 2003, enterprise security has become possible using TAM for e-business on the Linux platform running on Intel-compatible hardware. This tutorial will help security integrators and developers quickly get started using IBM Tivoli Access Manager on Linux. This tutorial provides tips for the installation process in a standard scenario. Also included are some verification tests that will help you ensure that the installation is running fine.

This tutorial assumes that you are familiar with Tivoli Access Manager for e-business. You should also have a basic familiarity with the Linux platform. Refer to Resources for related material.

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Software and hardware requirements

The following table illustrates the availability of various Tivoli Access Manager components for different distributions of Linux. Yes indicates support that existed prior to the release of Fixpack 2 (FP2), while New indicates support that is new with Fixpack 2.

TAM version 4.1 FP2 delivers major support for Red Hat and SuSE Linux on Intel hardware, allowing you to run the policy server and WebSEAL with the required runtime. That support is demonstrated in this tutorial.

The sample platform is a 1.4 GHz Pentium 4 system with 512 MB of RAM running Red Hat Linux 7.3. This represents a sufficient developer workstation. For the recommended hardware, check the Tivoli Access Manager 4.1 Base Installation Guide.

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Tivoli Access Manager and WebSEAL

Single sign-on (SSO) functionality is a key base requirement for e-business implementations. IBM Tivoli Access Manager offers robust and flexible SSO support and secure customer session management. By providing highly available and centralized authorization services, Tivoli Access Manager for e-business enables you to better manage and secure your business-critical distributed information, while ensuring that you can meet the time-to-market, flexibility, and scalability requirements that today's on-demand world requires.

The IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-business reverse proxy WebSEAL server is placed between Internet users and your intranet. It enables secure, policy-based, and highly available transactions. The Tivoli WebSEAL server typically resides between two firewalls, creating a semi-protected network commonly referred to as a demilitarized zone, or DMZ. All other servers can then be placed behind the inner firewall inside the more secure corporate network. This configuration prohibits unauthorized users from directly connecting to servers within the corporate network, as the figure below illustrates.

Let's take a closer look at some of the components illustrated here:

• Policy server: Manages the object space database.
• WebSEAL: Runs the reverse proxy server and policy enforcer.
• User registry: An LDAP server; stores users, groups, and metadata.
• Web portal manager: Provides Web user administration.
• Junction: An HTTP or HTTPS connection between a front-end WebSEAL server and a back-end Web application server. Junctions logically combine the Web space of the back-end server with the Web space of the WebSEAL server, resulting in a unified view of the entire Web object space. Information about junctions is provided in Creating and testing a junction .

Note that Web server plug-ins offer an alternative to the reverse proxy server.

Additional components are available to meet specific requirements:

• Authorization server: Manages an object space database replica in synchronization with the policy server for remote mode enforcers.
• Authorization Development Kit: Helps developers build authorization into an application using C (aznAPI) or Java (JAAS and the PdPermission class) APIs.
• WebSEAL Development Kit: Helps developers build custom authorization methods (CDAS) to complement those available out of the box.
• Plug-in for IBM Edge Server's caching proxy
• Plug-in for IBM HTTP Server
• Plug-in for MS IIS Web server

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Table of contents

• Before you start
• Installing TAM
• Configuring TAM
• Checking and starting TAM components
• Creating and testing a junction
• Summary
• Resources
• About the authors

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