This page is the home page of a virtual (or software defined) wide area net: SD-WAN known as RD-MKB.com.
Computer networks vary from a simple Local Area Network, to a corporate Wide Area Network, and ultimately what we call the Internet. Refer to the Types of Internet Networks page for more details.
For individual developers, teams, schools, or corporations those networks can be very complicated. The Domain Naming System makes accessing the internet relatively easy by encapsulating the identity of every server and even a web page or application into a simple URL that can be attached to a Hyperlink.
However the original nature of the Internet was one of trust because the users were usually students and scholars publishing freely available research papers, and that disappeared years ago. Now nearly every aspect of internet use involves resources that are not expected to be freely available. Think about your bank account, your. personal financial information, and corporate proprietary assets. Not all internet resources are suitable for immature users or malicious actors.
An institution (school, university, laboratory, corporation, or even a team of freelancers spread across the globe) can create an SD-WAN to collect, protect, and make available diverse resources that are used by the group while protecting them from the whole internet.
For example, the MichaelKentBurns.com mentoring group and the FreeDev-Team work together on a collection of GitHub repositories and development servers on research, development, and client deployment of solutions.
Who we are:
We are a team of freelance developers, and researchers. We live and work across two continents and have no central offices. We are approaching 25 individuals, and will likely invite others. We are engaging diverse clients.
What we use and own:
(Simple HTML rendering of assets)
The Problem:
The list above shows that we have quite a few digital assets, all of which need to be protected.
Each of them is accessed by one or two specific URL’s
The access to the administrative interface (wp-admin) and some of the WP sites individually is controlled currently with userid/password protections. I get dizzy when trying to keep track of all of my passwords for all these accounts and I even use a very helpful password manager. There is no centralization for password management or access control.
Every time you switch from one task to another, you need to login with username and password.
The Solution:
What we need is to consolidate all of those assets under the umbrella of an SD-WAN
How to build an SD-WAN Introducing Cloudflare
*** I’m still figuring this part out. ***
Cloudflare implements a lot of services such as proxy, reverse proxy.
Introducing SSO: Single Sign On
Many large internet enterprises provide SSO both for their products, but they also serve as an SSO service for other organizations: List of single sign-on implementations
One of those providers is GitHub that most independent developers already have an account on. They also provide a service to define GitHub Organizations.
There is the FreeDev-Group organization.
And now there is the MichaelKentBurns.com organization, though I might just replace that with RD-MKB.com
Each organization can define digital assets, a list of GitHub account holders, and rules of access.
*** I’m still figuring this part out. ***
Using GitHub as an SSO service for WordPress sites.
We want to be able to set our Github organizations as the SSO service for our WP sites.
*** I’m still figuring this part out. ***