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  • 1.  ISAM WRP Management Root and Locale Selection

    Posted Wed March 13, 2019 04:36 PM

    Hello

    We are customizing all content for EN and FR locale for years with our corporate branding and since we don't do business in other countries/regions, we want to prevent content for locale that we don't support to render with the default IBM branding.

    I had opened a case 1-2 years ago asking how to have content for certain languages not displayed ever, no matter what 'Accept-Language' was header provided by the Web Browser. I am unsure of the recommendation provided at the time was viable or applicable.

     

    Let me go through some candidate solutions and alternatives that came to my mind now:

    1. Delete all non-EN locale and non-FR locale content folders from the management root. But this did not work as the ISAM WRP was still attempting to retrieve the (let's say) ES (Spanish) locale content from the appliance resulting in errors because the folder was not there anymore. My naïve expectation was that the ISAM WPR would have defaulted to another "default" configured locale (such as EN) folder. But it did not.
    2. Leave all folders in the WRP in place, even those that we do not intent to support, but overwrite all their content with ours (let's say "EN"). Can be time consuming but this is a one-time job, except when there are corporate branding updates.
    3. Delete all folders in the WRP that we don't want to support but somehow only leave a symbolic link index.html directing in the locale again of our choice (let's say "EN").

     

    Your comments/recommendations are welcomed.

     

     

     

    Sylvain Gilbert, p. ing., Conseiller Technique Infrastructures Securité/Security Infrastructures Technical Advisor



  • 2.  RE: ISAM WRP Management Root and Locale Selection

    Posted Wed March 13, 2019 11:04 PM

    Hello Sylvain,

    The correct approach is to delete the language directories.

    The following section of the ISAM Knowledge Center documents how the locale directories work:

    https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSPREK_9.0.6/com.ibm.isam.doc/wrp_config/reference/ref_multi_loc_cond.html

    • Multi-locale support is enabled at all times on the WebSEAL server.
    • Installation of specific language packs determines what languages are supported.
    • If WebSEAL receives a message with no Accept-Language HTTP header, WebSEAL defaults to C.
    • WebSEAL always returns the UTF-8 character set to the user, regardless of what the Accept-Charset HTTP header value requests.
    • If WebSEAL accesses a locale directory for a translated message, and the directory is empty (for example, the contents were removed by the administrator), a server error page is returned.


    I tested by deleting just the "es" directory under the management directory.  Then made request with Accept-Language header with value "es".  The default login.html page was returned from the "C" directory (the default directory with the English language pages).  You could remove all language directories except "fr".  You would be left with "C" and "fr" to cover English and French languages.  All client making requests with Accept-Language value other than "fr" would receive the English pages.

    Perhaps during your testing the directory was not deleted but its contents were?  See 5th condition above.

    Regards,

    Steve





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    Steven Hughes
    IBM Security Support
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: ISAM WRP Management Root and Locale Selection

    Posted Thu March 14, 2019 05:07 PM

    Thanks Steve

     

    The solution you proposed worked perfectly.

     

    Don't know what I had done wrong 2 years ago but today my test work flawlessly maybe because I performed the cleanup with restapi/ansible.

     

    Also, I deleted the entire directories whereas 2 years ago I had probably just deleted the content under the language 'root' directories, and not the language 'root' directories themselves.

     

    Will proposed in the coming days an updated update_management_root Ansible roles on Github.com that takes care of everything, including deletion off non-required locales.

     

    Sylvain

     




    Original Message