[cisco-voip] LDAP Authentication when CUCM publisher is down.

[Lelio Fulgenzi]

The worst case scenario, which we ran into, was a scenario where the pub is up and accepting auth requests but not able to process them. In our case the cluster was up for almost 300 days, and there were memory error alerts popping up. It would be nice for the system to understand this issue and go to the next node to try the auth process. 

Interesting note about LDAPS. We are using that. Not sure if that poses additional issues. 

Wish there was an easy way to test this out in production. Perhaps a quick ACL to block phone agent and desktop agent access to the pub and see what happens. And then another test where the ACL blocks access to the LDAP server temporarily. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 6, 2015, at 10:04 AM, Ryan Huff <ryanhuff at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Dan!
> 
> Thanks for the clarification/correction .... I just happen to have a few 3-node cluster hanging around and I just tried this 5 times in a mix of 9.1.1, 10.0 and 10.5 and here is what I found:
> 
> 3 times LDAP auth was a seamless failover to the sub
> 2 times LDAP auth did not work on the sub until I bounced the tomcat service on the sub, then it worked fine.
> 
> I'm wondering if that, on the times it doesn't work in a failover (because I have experienced it a few times) a simple service bounce is all that is needed?
> 
> I suppose another cause of LDAP auth failover NOT working (but not always intuitive) would be cluster over wan (nodes in the cluster are not all on the same segment) and the sub node that LDAP auth is trying to bind from can't talk to the AD server.
> 
> From: dpagan at fidelus.com
> To: lelio at uoguelph.ca; cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
> Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 13:45:08 +0000
> Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] LDAP Authentication when CUCM publisher is down.
> 
> LDAP authentication is used by Tomcat and isn’t just restricted to the Publisher server - Subscriber nodes handle this as well. DirSync is specific to synchronization of LDAP attributes and only runs on the Pub, so synchronization would definitely be affected if the Publisher is offline. I suggest to check out the Tomcat Security logs off CUCM for more info on user authentication against LDAP and your source of failure.
> 
>  
> 
> So to answer your question, LDAP authentication should still work when the Publisher is offline.
> 
>  
> 
> For the UCCX agent concern, authentication of agents occur over AXL to CUCM, so if the AXL server is the Publisher, and that’s offline or experiencing issue w/ Tomcat during an authentication attempt by the UCCX agent, then I would imagine seeing a failure. AXL and Tomcat Security logs off the UCM side should shed some light on that problem
> 
>  
> 
> As for SSO, I checked w/ my teammate and, in his experience, SSO can be handled by Subscriber nodes assuming the metadata was imported to those servers - authentication occurs against the IdP and not CUCM so this seems logical to me as well.
> 
>  
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
>  
> 
> - Dan
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> From: cisco-voip [mailto:cisco-voip-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Lelio Fulgenzi
> Sent: Monday, July 06, 2015 9:16 AM
> To: cisco-voip at puck.nether.net
> Subject: Re: [cisco-voip] LDAP Authentication when CUCM publisher is down.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> This has been our experience as well. Glad you started this thread. It's seems like a huge single point of failure to me for such an integral part of the process. I suspect hunt group login would also be affected. 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> 
> On Jul 6, 2015, at 5:02 AM, Matthew Collins <mcollins at block.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
>  
> 
> CUCM 10.5
> 
>  
> 
> Just trying to get some conformation, When LDAP Synchronization and authentication is enabled this is performed by the DirSync process that only runs on the CUCM Publisher. So If we lose the CUCM Publisher for whatever reason it would seem that the Authentication also fails due to the single point of failure of DirSync. Should LDAP authentication still work if the CUCM Publisher is still down.
> 
>  
> 
> So for LDAP users this would stop them signing in to Jabber clients and UCCX agents who are ldap’ed synced logging into the finesse webpages. Does anyone know is SSO is resilient on the CUCM publisher or would SSO still work in a Publisher outage.
> 
>  
> 
> Regards
> 
>  
> 
> Matthew Collins
> 
>  
> 
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