Working with Portal for ArcGIS authentication: Enterprise groups, the Portal Administrator Directory, and SAML

A brief background

When managing authentication with your chosen identity store in Portal for ArcGIS, authentication can be configured at the Portal tier, the Web tier, or the External tier. The primary differences from a user experience perspective being Portal tier requires credentials to be provided to sign in and it does not support a Single Sign On (SSO) experience. Web tier can be configured to utilise the ArcGIS Web Adaptor, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), and Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) for a SSO user experience.

If using an enterprise identity store with Portal tier authentication, by its nature it requires a closer integration with your Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) compatible identity store.

New GDA2020 transformations for WebGIS

May 2021

Esri Australia has been working with Esri and ICSM to ensure that the ArcGIS system can support clients migration from the GDA94 static datum to GDA2020 static datum. The ArcGIS system now fully supports data transformations via 7-parameter similarity transformation, or NTv2.0 transformation Grids.

As a result we are now seeing many clients migrate their authoritative datasets to GDA2020 and requiring all delivered data is in this same static datum. State and national governments are now delivering foundational open datasets in GDA2020 as well

In parallel to this migration we are also seeing more clients taking up WebGIS and delivering data via web services instead of shipping datasets or producing PDF’s. This is enabling a greater uptake web and mobile GIS, providing better informed field operators and getting live data in the hands of people who need it as they need it.

These two waves of change have presented a significant challenge. While transformations existed between WGS84 & GDA94 and GDA94 & GDA2020, there existed no direct path from GDA2020 to WGS84. If you wanted to place GDA2020 data into WebGIS you had to transform you data back through GDA94 to WGS84. Effectively moving the data back to its old location prior to publishing. Many clients asked why????

It has been termed the WGS84 Projection dilemma. So what’s changing?

How to determine the machine level status of your ArcGIS Enterprise High Availability environment.

Background: GIS administrators are routinely required to do maintenance activities on their ArcGIS Enterprise High Availability setup. Examples of a maintenance activity can be: Installing Microsoft patches or Esri patches, or resizing instances etc. Before the maintenance is initiated, GIS administrators should know the exact status of the ArcGIS Enterprise setup so that a workflow can be finalized (that is, whether the application on the machine is assigned a Primary or a Standby role). If this is not taken into account, the architecture may become unstable. For example, if the Primary is shutdown first and then the Standby is shutdown, and the Standby is fired up and then the Primary, then the two machines may end up in a scenario where there is confusion as to which machine is the Primary machine.

How to get Docker Desktop to run on startup for ArcGIS Notebook Server

In any enterprise environment, it is crucial that services are able to restart/recover automatically in the event of disruption or failure. In the example of this blog post, this would be if there is a power outage or the server reboots unexpectedly.

When your services are not able to automatically recover, this can cause long outages for your users, especially if you are not actively monitoring your underlying infrastructure.

How to Add New User Types and Add-on Applications to ArcGIS Enterprise

Do you need to incorporate newly purchased ArcGIS Enterprise named user licenses or Add-ons to your existing environment?

The following workflow will guide you on how to update your existing license file and import your new licenses seamlessly:

Obtaining various logs for your Enterprise GIS

Whenever a user runs into some sort of problem with the GIS system, one of the first things to look at would be the relevant logs. These give a more detailed insight into what is happening and where potential problems were encountered. This post will explain exactly how to obtain every type of log in the ArcGIS Enterprise stack.

Multi-tier base deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8.1 using ArcGIS Enterprise Cloud Builder for Microsoft Azure.

ArcGIS Enterprise Cloud Builder for Microsoft Azure is an application you install on your local Microsoft Windows machine to deploy ArcGIS Enterprise and stand-alone ArcGIS Server sites on Microsoft Azure. Depending on what role you want the site to fill, Azure Cloud builder provides several deployment options.

This blog will discuss the workflow of deploying multi-machine ArcGIS Enterprise (non-HA) with each component of base Enterprise deployment – Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS GIS Server, Data Store and App Gateway – installed on its own dedicated servers. One thing to note, starting from Azure Cloud Builder 10.8 for Microsoft Azure,  the base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment is no longer accessed through a load balancer and reverse proxy. The 10.8 version of ArcGIS Enterprise Cloud Builder for Microsoft Azure creates ArcGIS Enterprise deployments that use a single Azure Application Gateway to access the portal and all federated servers – this is referred to as a version 2 (V2) deployment type.

Important Portal for ArcGIS Security Alert

4 June 2020

Esri has announced that they have detected a critical security vulnerability in the Portal for ArcGIS component of ArcGIS Enterprise when special steps are taken by persons with network access to the ArcGIS Enterprise portal to exploit Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF), which can result in access to and control over other infrastructure resources by unauthenticated persons.

Understanding GDA2020 and it’s relationship with Web GIS

NOTE: this was first published Dec 2018 and has been amended in June 2021 to reflect additional software and transformation updates. See note at end of blog.

Background

Australia sits on one of the Earth’s fastest moving tectonic plates which has been moving 70 millimetres per year. By 2020, Australia will have moved 1.8 metres north east of it’s location in 1994. To effectively map the earth, representations, known as datums are used to model and identify locations. Australia’s national datum; Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94) will soon be replaced by a new datum Geodetic Datum of Australia (GDA2020). GDA2020 will align with current positioning technology.

Geoscience Australia and the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) have released a new Geodetic datum GDA2020. The datum provides higher positional accuracy and will be able to represent locations dynamically rather than the stationary GDA94. .

In the coming two to three years most organisations will be transforming their spatial data from the GDA94 datum to the new GDA2020 datum. Esri’s, ArcGIS Software has been updated to accommodate these new datums across Australia and will support all of our customers rigorous requirements for locational and positional accuracy.

Debugging the Esri Resource Proxy and ArcGIS Web Adaptor (IIS) using Fiddler

In my role at Esri Australia resolving Enterprise and Developer support issues, there’s rarely a day that goes by where it’s not immensely useful to investigate communication between the different parts of a system. When a component of a GIS is not behaving as expected, forming a complete picture of the behaviour across the system is often instrumental in understanding the underlying cause. This article will focus on the special case of intercepting HTTP requests generated by applications running on top of Microsoft IIS, such as ArcGIS Web Adaptor and the Esri Resource Proxy.