Sametime Client Update Breaks Single Sign On

I recently built a new Sametime Complete environment for a customer that included an Advanced and Meeting server.  When I had completed the build I tested a new standalone Sametime client in a VM to confirm that I could login to the new Community server and it would log me into the Advanced and Meeting servers.   Having added the necessary lines to plugin_customization.ini to enable  Sametime Advanced* I was able to login to the Community server successfully and be automatically logged into the Meeting and Advanced servers.   However, when I handed over to the customer for testing I was surprised that they couldn’t actually login to the Meeting server at all through the Sametime client. They got a server unreachable error.

So I did further testing

  1. On my client I was configured to use SSL for both the Meeting server and Sametime Advanced. I could login to the Community server and that logged me in securely to Meetings and Advanced.  That same configuration on a test workstation of theirs failed to login to the Meeting server saying server not responding (although it did successfully log in to Advanced)
  2. If I removed the Sametime Advanced servers from the Sametime workstation client it could suddenly log in to the Meeting server
  3. If I changed the Meeting server configuration in the workstation client to use HTTP (80) instead of HTTP (443) I would be logged in to the Meeting and Advanced server
  4. On the test workstation I could always login to the Meeting server securely through a browser and open a tab to the Advanced server and be automatically logged in there even when the Sametime client claimed it couldn’t reach the server.

So why did it fail on every one of their workstations and not for me? It turns out they were using the latest Sametime client I had downloaded from Fix Central (20170402-0344) for them whereas I was using the 2016 build (20160624-0209).  I took a snapshot of my VM and upgraded my Sametime client to the April 2017 one and I immediately was unable to log in to the Meeting server. I rolled the snapshot back to the 2016 client and everything worked again.

One of the major updates in the 2017 client was SAML functionality and it does seem that the single sign on logic has been broken in some way by that 2017 update.  Everything is working with the 2016 client so for the time being (and whilst IBM investigate the PMR) we are rolling that out.  One to watch out for though - newer is not always better and you might want to avoid the latest 20170402-0344 update.

 

*for Sametime Advanced login to work at all in the client you must ensure “remember password” is checked and the following two lines are in the plugin_customization.ini

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.bcs/useTokens=false
com.ibm.collaboration.realtime/enableAdvanced=true

4 thoughts on “Sametime Client Update Breaks Single Sign On

  1. Thank you for sharing this, Gab! Important info!

  2. I don’t see that client release in Fix Central. Which base version is this?

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