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Authentication stops working for certain users

  • 1.  Authentication stops working for certain users

    Posted Mon February 01, 2021 07:19 PM
    I have a service account that I used for building cubes on a tools server.  The account authenticates to our Production environment (11.1.7 FP2) nightly during the build process. Recently this account stops being authenticated by Cognos and the cubes fail to build.  The account hasn't been locked out in AD, only Cognos doesn't like it. I tested the account against our DEV server and it works fine (it connects to the same AD system).  This authentication issue happened 3 days ago and to fix it I had to restart the Cognos server. It happened again last night.  Is there a way to fix the issue without restarting the Cognos service?  Does anyone know why this is happening? BTW the service account has been used for over 5 years, never having issues like this.

    I hope someone has a clue to this issue as I don't like taking the system down regularly to fix authentication.
    Thanks in advance everyone.

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    Scott
    Cognos Administrator
    Wenatchee WA
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    #CognosAnalyticswithWatson


  • 2.  RE: Authentication stops working for certain users

    Posted Tue February 02, 2021 12:47 AM
    Enable debug level on logging of AAA sessions in order to understand details?

    Up to 11.0.7 you could use the ipfclientconfig.xml files for debugging AAA issues.
    Since then this has moved to the portal: Manage > Configuration > Diagnostic Logging > Enable AAA

    This will log lots of lines per login to your cognosserver.log whenever authentication is involved:
    cat /opt/IBM/cognos/crn0/logs/cognosserver.log | grep -i ".AAA" | grep -i trace

    I would schedule the activation/de-activation of AAA logging to the time when the cube is build. This would prevent performance issues and also strip down the log size a bit.

    Enable logging (on Unix)  by:
    * echo '{"logsEnabled":[{"topicName":"AAA","topicType":"BUILTIN"}],"socketAppenderHostname":"localhost","meta":{"type":"glugLoggingConfiguration","version":"0.0.1"},"socketAppenderPort":-1}' > /opt/IBM/cognos/crn0/logs/cognosserver.log

    Back to default:
    * echo '{"logsEnabled":[{"topicName":"DEFAULT","topicType":"BUILTIN"}],"socketAppenderHostname":"localhost","meta":{"type":"glugLoggingConfiguration","version":"0.0.1"},"socketAppenderPort":-1}'  > /opt/IBM/cognos/crn0/logs/cognosserver.log

    ​* Link to documentation 


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    Ralf Roeber
    https://linkedin.com/in/ralf-roeber-470425a/
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Authentication stops working for certain users

    Posted Tue February 02, 2021 10:37 AM
    Scott,

    You could be running out of resources for the authentication service due to increased usage patterns or a new bug. Try checking what the Java process is using over time in the administration console. We had to increase the Maximum memory for the Java process on our primary Content Manager to 12 GB to prevent the occasional fail over when processing a lot of batch jobs including data set refreshes.

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    Robert Hofstetter
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    Original Message