Thursday, September 14, 2017

Restoring Data in Azure Sql Server

I successfully restored my data after I have accidently updated it incorrectly. For the restoration process I referred the following article:

The Super Article Here

You would require SQL Database Migration Wizard. However its stored in Codeplex which in due course will be shutdown. I have attached the File for convenience.

SQL Database Migration Wizard


Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Digest Authentication with RestSharp


This original source of the content was available at www.ifjeffcandoit.com, but ironically the website was not operational by the time of writing. This article helped me a lot in solving the trouble I had in Digest Authentication. Since I could not reach author for permission, for the benefit others, I did a copy and paste of the Cached version.


The orginal content goes as:

The Situation

Recently I worked on a project that involved integration between a data center and a 3rd party via a RESTful API. For securing the service, the 3rd party had used:
  • SSL-Encryption
  • Digest Authentication
I did some research for REST clients that would work with .NET and decided that RestSharp was a good option for our purposes.

The problem

Out of the box, Restsharp does not support Digest authentication but it allows for you to write your own implementation of IAuthenticator. The Internet was my friend again as I found this link which gave the simplest implementation of digest authentication for Restsharp imaginable. These few lines of code worked for my initial tests.

BUT… when I needed to integrate querystring values into a GET call, the authentication would fail.
The reason for the failure was because hash being included in the Authentication portion of the digest authentication within Restsharp did not include the the querystring.
For example:

In this URI http://example.com/authors?subject=princesses only the “http://example.com/authors” was included in the authentication header (I used fiddler to glean the values).

How to get around this?

Some more research showed that I wasn’t the only one who had come across this problem. The most helpful link I found was here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3109507/httpwebrequests-sends-parameterless-uri-in-authorization-header.

The comments by Andomar and Gerfboy were what lead me to my “solution”.
Andomar posted the C# code for DigestAuthFixer which I slightly modified to include Gerfboy’s changes.

Gerfboy pointed out that the “opaque” value was required – the 3rd party’s server was sending this value as part of the auth response. Sending this value back in my request was required.

One other change I had to make was an “if” in my authentication method. I only wanted to do this “fix” if it was a GET – the post/put actions would fail otherwise. I’m assuming these failed because my “fixer” was doing a GET, and not matching the action of the call.

Below is the code I needed to add to my project to get Digest Authentication to work with RestSharp.

// The fix was found here:
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3109507/httpwebrequests-sends-parameterless-uri-in-authorization-header
// I needed to call the service directly to get the nonce and opaque values.  Once I could get those
// the header could be built and sent with the request.

public class DigestAuthenticator : IAuthenticator
{
private readonly string _user;
private readonly string _pass;

public DigestAuthenticator(string user, string pass)
{
_user = user;
_pass = pass;
}

public void Authenticate(IRestClient client, IRestRequest request)
{
request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(_user, _pass);

// TODO: Figure out how to remove the if.. currently PUT does not work if the DigestAuthFixer is in place
if (request.Method == Method.GET)
{
var url = client.BuildUri(request).ToString();
var uri = new Uri(url);

var digestAuthFixer = new DigestAuthFixer(client.BaseUrl, _user, _pass);
digestAuthFixer.GrabResponse(uri.PathAndQuery);
var digestHeader = digestAuthFixer.GetDigestHeader(uri.PathAndQuery);
request.AddParameter("Authorization", digestHeader, ParameterType.HttpHeader);
}

}
}

public class DigestAuthFixer
{
private static string _host;
private static string _user;
private static string _password;
private static string _realm;
private static string _nonce;
private static string _qop;
private static string _cnonce;
private static string _opaque;
private static DateTime _cnonceDate;
private static int _nc;

public DigestAuthFixer(string host, string user, string password)
{
_host = host;
_user = user;
_password = password;
}

private string CalculateMd5Hash(
string input)
{
var inputBytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(input);
var hash = MD5.Create().ComputeHash(inputBytes);
var sb = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var b in hash)
sb.Append(b.ToString("x2"));
return sb.ToString();
}

private string GrabHeaderVar(
string varName,
string header)
{
var regHeader = new Regex(string.Format(@"{0}=""([^""]*)""", varName));
var matchHeader = regHeader.Match(header);
if (matchHeader.Success)
return matchHeader.Groups[1].Value;
throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Header {0} not found", varName));
}

public string GetDigestHeader(
string dir)
{
_nc = _nc + 1;

var ha1 = CalculateMd5Hash(string.Format("{0}:{1}:{2}", _user, _realm, _password));
var ha2 = CalculateMd5Hash(string.Format("{0}:{1}", "GET", dir));
var digestResponse =
CalculateMd5Hash(string.Format("{0}:{1}:{2:00000000}:{3}:{4}:{5}", ha1, _nonce, _nc, _cnonce, _qop, ha2));

return string.Format("Digest username=\"{0}\", realm=\"{1}\", nonce=\"{2}\", uri=\"{3}\", " +
"algorithm=MD5, response=\"{4}\", opaque=\"{8}\", qop={5}, nc={6:00000000}, cnonce=\"{7}\"",
_user, _realm, _nonce, dir, digestResponse, _qop, _nc, _cnonce, _opaque);
}

public void GrabResponse(
string dir)
{
var url = _host + dir;
var uri = new Uri(url);

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);

// If we've got a recent Auth header, re-use it!
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(_cnonce) &&
DateTime.Now.Subtract(_cnonceDate).TotalHours < 1.0)
{
request.Headers.Add("Authorization", GetDigestHeader(dir));
}

HttpWebResponse response;
try
{
response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
}
catch (WebException ex)
{
// Try to fix a 401 exception by adding a Authorization header
if (ex.Response == null || ((HttpWebResponse)ex.Response).StatusCode != HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized)
throw;

var wwwAuthenticateHeader = ex.Response.Headers["WWW-Authenticate"];
_realm = GrabHeaderVar("realm", wwwAuthenticateHeader);
_nonce = GrabHeaderVar("nonce", wwwAuthenticateHeader);
_qop = GrabHeaderVar("qop", wwwAuthenticateHeader);

_nc = 0;
_opaque = GrabHeaderVar("opaque", wwwAuthenticateHeader);
_cnonce = new Random().Next(123400, 9999999).ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
_cnonceDate = DateTime.Now;
}

}
}

Client Code:

public class WebClientProxy
{
private readonly string _url;
private readonly string _userId;
private readonly string _password;
private readonly int _merchantId;

public WebClientProxy(string url, string userId, string password, int merchantId)
{
_url = url;
_userId = userId;
_password = password;
_merchantId = merchantId;
}

public T Execute<T>(RestRequest request) where T : new()
{
var client = new RestClient
{
BaseUrl = _url,
Authenticator = new DigestAuthenticator(_userId, _password),

};

var response = client.Execute<T>(request);

if (response.ErrorException != null)
{
throw response.ErrorException;
}
return response.Data;
}

public Somethings SomethingGetAllValuesSince(DateTime sinceDate)
{
var request = new RestRequest
{
Resource = "something/{SomethingId}/accounts",
RequestFormat = DataFormat.Json,
Method = method
};
request.AddParameter("SomethingId", _somethingId, ParameterType.UrlSegment);
request.AddParameter("since", sinceDateValue, ParameterType.GetOrPost);
return Execute<Somethings>(request);
}

}

Cached version of the content can be seen here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sm-c6n7aGN8J:www.ifjeffcandoit.com/2013/05/16/digest-authentication-with-restsharp/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lk

Thursday, April 27, 2017

Azure Learning: Change Web App Time Zone

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tomholl/2015/04/06/changing-the-server-time-zone-on-azure-web-apps/