Form-based authentication problem with weblogic

Question

Hi Everyone,
The following problem related to form-based authentication
was posted one week ago and no reponse. Can someone give it
a shot? One more thing is added here. When I try it on J2EE
server and do the same thing, I didn't encounter this error
message, and I am redirected to the homeage.
Thanks.
-John
I am using weblogic5.1 and RDBMSRealm as the security realm. I am having the following problem with the form-based authentication login mechanism. Does anyone have an idea what the problem is and how to solve it?
When I login my application and logout as normal procedure, it is OK. But if I login and use the browser's BACK button to back the login page and try to login as a new user, I got the following error message,
"Form based authentication failed. Could not find session."
When I check the LOG file, it gives me the following message,
"Form based authentication failed. One of the following reasons could cause it: HTTP sessions are disabled. An old session ID was stored in the browser."
Normally, if you login and want to relogin without logout first, it supposes to direct you to the existing user session. But I don't understand why it gave me this error. I also checked my property file, it appears that the HTTP sessions are enabled as follows,
weblogic.httpd.session.enable=true

Answer 1

Hi...
Hehe... I actually did implement the way you implement it. My login.jsp actually checks if the user is authenticated. If yes, then it will forward it to the home page. On the other hand, I used ServletAuthentication to solve the problem mentioned by Cameron where Form Authentication Failed usually occurs for the first login attempt. I'm also getting this error occasionally. Using ServletAuthentication totally eliminates the occurence of this problem.
I'm not using j_security_check anymore. ServletAuthentication does all the works. It also uses RDBMSRealm to authenticate the user. I think the biggest disadvantage I can see when using ServletAuthentication is that the requested resource will not be returned after authentication cause the page returned after authenticating the user is actually hard coded (for my case, it's the home.jsp)
cheers...
Jerson
"John Wang" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
Hi Jerson,
I tried your code this weekend, it didn't work in my case. But
I solved my specific problem other way. The idea behind my problem is that the user tries to relogin when he already logs in. Therefore, I just redirect the user into another page when he is getting the login page by htting the BACK button, rather than reauthenticate the user as the way you did.
But, I think your idea is very helpful if it could work. Problems such multiple concurrence logins can be solved by pre-processing.
In your new code, you solved the problem with a new approach. I am just wondering, do you still implement it with your login.jsp file? In other word, your action in login.jsp is still "Authenticate"? Where do you put the URL "j_security_check"?
Thanks.
-John
"Jerson Chua" <[email protected]> wrote:
I've solved the problem by using ServletAuthentication. So far I'm not getting the error message. One of the side effects is that it doesn't return the requested URI after authentication, it will always return the home page.
Jerson
package com.cyberj.catalyst.web;
import weblogic.servlet.security.*;
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.io.*;
public class Authenticate extends HttpServlet {
private ServletAuthentication sa = new ServletAuthentication("j_username", "j_password");
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
int authenticated = sa.weak(request, response);
if (authenticated == ServletAuthentication.NEEDS_CREDENTIALS ||
authenticated == ServletAuthentication.FAILED_AUTHENTICATION) {
response.sendRedirect("fail_login.jsp");
} else {
response.sendRedirect("Home.jsp");
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
doPost(request, response);
"Jerson Chua" <[email protected]> wrote:
The problem is still there even if I use page redirection. Grrr... My boss wants me to solve this problem so what are the alternatives I can do? Are there any other ways of authenticating the user? In my web tier... I'm using isUserInRole, getRemoteUser and the web tier actually connects to EJBs. If I implement my custom authentication, I wouldn't be able to use this functionalities.
Has anyone solved this problem? I've tried the example itself and the same problem occurs.
Jerson
"Cameron Purdy" <[email protected]> wrote:
Jerson,
First try it redirected (raw) to see if that indeed is the problem ... then
if it works you can "fix" it the way you want.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
http://www.tangosol.com
+1.617.623.5782
WebLogic Consulting Available
"Jerson Chua" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hi...
Thanks for your suggestion... I've actually thought of that solution. Butusing page redirection will expose the user's password. I'm thinking of
another indirection where I will redirect it to another servlet but the
password is encrypted.
What do you think?
thanks....
Jerson
"Cameron Purdy" <[email protected]> wrote:
Maybe redirect to the current URL after killing the session to let the
request clean itself up. I don't think that a lot of the request (such
as
remote user) will be affected by killing the session until the nextrequest
comes in.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
http://www.tangosol.com
+1.617.623.5782
WebLogic Consulting Available
"Jerson Chua" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hello guys...
I've a solution but it doesn't work yet so I need your help. Because
one
of the reason for getting form base authentication failed is if an
authenticated user tries to login again. For example, the one mentionedby
John using the back button to go to the login page and when the user logsin
again, this error occurs.
So here's my solution
Instead of submitting the page to j_security_check, submit it to a
servlet
which will check if the user is logged in or not. If yes, invalidates its
session and forward it to j_security_check. But there's a problem in this
solution, eventhough the session.invalidate() (which actually logs theuser
out) is executed before forwarded to j_security_check, the user doesn't
immediately logged out. How did I know this, because after calling
session.invalidate, i tried calling request.RemoteUser() and it doesn't
return null. So I'm still getting the error. What I want to ask you guyis
how do I force logout before the j_security_check is called.
here's the code I did which the login.jsp actually submits to
import javax.servlet.*;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import java.io.*;
public class Authenticate extends HttpServlet {
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponseresponse)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
if (request.getRemoteUser() != null) {
HttpSession session = request.getSession(false);
System.out.println(session.isNew());
session.invalidate();
Cookie[] cookies = request.getCookies();
for (int i = 0; i < cookies.length; i++) {
cookies.setMaxAge(0);
getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/j_security_check").forward(reques
t, response);
public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponseresponse)
throws ServletException, java.io.IOException {
doPost(request, response);
let's help each other to solve this problem. thanks.
Jerson
"Jerson Chua" <[email protected]> wrote:
I thought that this problem will be solved on sp6 but to my
disappointment, the problem is still there. I'm also using RDBMSRealm,same
as John.
Jerson
"Cameron Purdy" <[email protected]> wrote:
John,
1. You are using a single WL instance (i.e. not clustered) on that
NT
box
and doing so without a proxy (e.g. specifying http://localhost:7001),
correct?
2. BEA will pay more attention to the problem if you upgrade to SP6.If
you don't have a reason NOT to (e.g. a particular regression), then
you
should upgrade. That will save you one go-around with support: "Hi,I
am
on SP5 and I have a problem.", "Upgrade to SP6 to see if that fixes
it.
Call back if that doesn't work."
3. Make sure that you are not doing anything special before or after
J_SECURITY_CHECK ... make sure that you have everything configuredand
done
by the book.
4. Email BEA a bug report at [email protected] ... see what they say.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
http://www.tangosol.com
+1.617.623.5782
WebLogic Consulting Available
"John Wang" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Cameron,
It seems to me that the problem I encountered is different a little
from
what you have, evrn though the error message is the same eventually.
Everytime I go through, I always get that error.
I am using weblogic5.1 and sp5 on NT4.0. Do you have any solutions
to
work
around this problem? If it was a BUG as you
pointed out, is there a way we can report it to the Weblogic
technical support and let them take a look?
Thnaks.
-John
"Cameron Purdy" <[email protected]> wrote:
John,
I will verify that I have seen this error now (after having read
about it
here for a few months) and it had the following characteristics:
1) It was intermittent, and appeared to be self-curing
2) It was not predictable, only seemed to occur at the first
login
attempt,
and may have been timing related
3) This was on Sun Solaris on a cluster of 2 Sparc 2xx's; the
proxy
was
Apache (Stronghold)
4) After researching the newsgroups, it appears that this "bug"
may
have gone away temporarily (?) in SP5 (although Jerson Chua
<[email protected]> mentioned that he still got it in SP5)
I was able to reproduce it most often by deleting the tmpwar and
tmp_deployments directories while the cluster was not running,
then
restarting the cluster. The first login attempt would fail(roughly
90%
of
the time?) and that server instance would then be ignored by the
proxy
for a
while (60 seconds?) -- meaning that the proxy would send all
traffic,
regardless of the number of "clients", to the other server in thecluster.
As far as I can tell, it is a bug in WebLogic, and probably has
been
there
for quite a while.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
http://www.tangosol.com
+1.617.623.5782
WebLogic Consulting Available
"John Wang" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hi Everyone,
The following problem related to form-based authentication
was posted one week ago and no reponse. Can someone give it
a shot? One more thing is added here. When I try it on J2EE
server and do the same thing, I didn't encounter this error
message, and I am redirected to the homeage.
Thanks.
-John
I am using weblogic5.1 and RDBMSRealm as the security realm. I
am
having
the following problem with the form-based authentication login
mechanism.
Does anyone have an idea what the problem is and how to solve it?
When I login my application and logout as normal procedure, it
is
OK.
But
if I login and use the browser's BACK button to back the login
page
and
try
to login as a new user, I got the following error message,
"Form based authentication failed. Could not find session."
When I check the LOG file, it gives me the following message,
"Form based authentication failed. One of the following reasons
could
cause it: HTTP sessions are disabled. An old session ID was stored
in
the
browser."
Normally, if you login and want to relogin without logout first,
it
supposes to direct you to the existing user session. But I don'tunderstand
why it gave me this error. I also checked my property file, it
appears
that
the HTTP sessions are enabled as follows,
weblogic.httpd.session.enable=true