Access List and Conflict Resolution Problem!

Question

My configuration for Allow and Deny is not allowing me to load images and CSS files through the gateway on a URLScraper channel.
I'm trying to figure out how to control access to resources using the Access List service, and I'm running into trouble. The Sun ONE Portal Server, Secure Remote Access 6.0 Administrator's Guide (Doc 816-6421-10) states:
Setting the Conflict Resolution Level
You can set the priority level for the dynamic attributes. If a user inherits multiple attribute templates, say from an organization and a role assignment, and there is a template conflict between the attributes in the two templates, the template with the highest priority is inherited. There are seven settings available ranging from Highest to Lowest.
See the Administration Guide, iPlanet Directory Server Access Management Edition for more details on conflict resolution.
Unfortunately the referenced Adminstration Guide for DSAME contains exactly 0 occurances of the word "conflict" in its 136 pages, so that reference was less than helpful. Chapter 17 of that document (Doc 816-5620-10) describes URL Policy Agent Attributes, which sheds some light on what the URL Deny and URL Allow settings mean. The key sentence is, "An empty Deny list will allow only those resources that are allowed by the Allow list."
So, I've set up my Access List services as follows:
o URL Deny is blank on all Access Lists
o URL Allow set as follows
---- isp
------- http://portal.acme.com/portal/* (company name changed to protect the guilty!)
---- acme.com organization
------- Conflict Resolution: Highest
------- http://portal.acme.com/portal/* (same as above)
---- Acme Customers Role - shared role for all Acme customers
------- Conflict Resolution: Medium
------- http://www.acme.com/*
------- http://support.acme.com/*
------- http://support2.acme.com/*
---- RoadRunner role - specific role for a specific customer
------- Conflict Resolution: Medium
------- http://roadrunnerinfo.acme.com/*
The Desktop services in each of the above two roles includes channels from the hosts in the URL Allow lists.
The behavior I'm seeing with this configuration is that the desktop channels include information from the scraped HTML, and the URLs are rewritten for the included images and CSS files and such. However, the gateway is denying access to the images referenced by the rewritten URL. That is, an image with a URL of https://portal.acme.com/http://roadrunnerinfo.acme.com/images/green.gif shows up as a broken image on the desktop. Attempting to access the URL to the image directly results in an "Access to this resource is denied !! Contact your administrator" error message.
If I set the conflict resolution on the acme.corp organization to Medium (or anything lower than the two role conflict resolution levels) results in the same error message as soon as the customer logs in (no desktop rendered). The same error occurs if I set the conflict resolution in the two roles to Highest (same as the top level organization), again with no desktop rendered on login.
If I put all the above referenced URLs in the acme.com organization Access List service, then I am successfully able to fetch all the resources (images, CSS, etc.) in the URLScraper HTML. Likewise if I put "*" in that Access List. However, this is less than ideal, as it would potentially allow other customers to view data that isn't theirs (Wile E. Coyote user should not be able to get to Road Runner data, and vice versa, and neither one of them should get at Acme private information!).
So, what am I doing wrong? Also, does anyone have any leads on where I can read up on how Access Lists and conflict resolution are supposed to work, since Sun neglected to include a valid reference in the Administrator's Guide, Portal Server 6.0 SRA?
Thanks!
-matt

Answer 1

Did you ever get anywhere with this. My experiments seem to inidicate that you cannot successfully combine Access and Deny directives, across roles or organizational defaults and a role.