On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 19:14 -0500, John A. Sullivan III wrote:

I'm finding several weird issues with DSGW authentication which make it very difficult for our users to use. Not to complain - great DS - but we're experiencing some problems.

We do not allow anonymous browsing of the tree. Each client has a user who has rights to search only their portion of the tree for possible DSGW logins. The ACI, place on the root, is thus:

(target = "ldap:///ou=Users,($dn),o=Internal,dc=ssiservices,dc=biz")(targetattr = "uid || st || sn || ou || name || entrydn || dn || dc || objectClass || cn || o || l || c || givenName") (version 3.0;acl "Client DSGW Lister";allow (search,read)(userdn = "ldap:///uid=*dsgwlister,[$dn],o=sysaccounts,dc=ssiservices,dc=biz");)

We have an example test user named sue.sutter. The full dn is uid=sue.sutter,ou=users,o=a0000-0006,o=internal,dc=ssiservices,dc=biz

The first step is to go the authentication page where we read: "The first step in authenticating to the directory is identifying yourself." This is why we created a user with rights to browse for other users and defined it with a binddnfile entry. That part is working fine.

If I enter sue.sutter, it does not find her directly but rather offers a list with a single hyperlinked choice. That's the first problem (a problem for anyone with a "." in their uid). The query has replaced the "." with a space: filter="(&(objectClass=person)(|(sn=sue sutter)(cn=sue sutter))) I tried surrounding it with quotes and escaping it with a back slash but the quote was interpreted literally and the back slash gave the same results as the period alone.

Is this a bug, a configuration error, or just the way it's supposed to be? If the latter, this is very user unfriendly. A techie might understand escape characters or special encoding but not an everyday user.

It wouldn't be so bad if they could simply click on the hyperlink and be allowed to login. However, the hyperlink does not work. Mousing over gives: javascript:authSubmit('uid%3Dsue.sutter%2Cou%3DUsers%2Co%3Da0000-0006% 2Co%3DInternal%2Cdc%3Dssiservices%2Cdc%3Dbiz');%20onMouseOver=

but it goes nowhere. A packet trace shows no packets coming from the browser to the DS. What might we have configured incorrectly to cause this? We see the same thing in Konqueror as we see in Firefox3 all running on fully patched Ubuntu 8.0.4.

Hmmm . . . this is getting long. I'll put the other problem into another email. Thanks - John

I should mention I also tried this after giving full rights to all attributes to all portions of the tree to the browsing user but had the exactly same results. Thanks - John