The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Eric G. Wolfe" <address@concealed>]

A few months ago, I tried updating Sympa 5.3.4 to 5.4.3, rather 
unsuccessfully.  We are still running Sympa 5.3.4 in production without 
any major issues.  We are using a generic_sso configuration in the 
auth.conf to authenticate with Kerberos using the Apache 2.2 
mod_auth_kerb.  So the Apache REMOTE_USER header/server variable is used 
to do a lookup from the netidmap_table and get the user's e-mail address.

So I can login just fine to Sympa 5.4.3.  As soon as I click a link 
/sympa/pref, I get logged out, then I get a message "ERROR (pref) - You 
need to login".  If I click the /sympa/serveradmin link, it is the same 
thing, "ERROR (serveradmin) - You need to login".

At first I thought it was a problem with a template.  So I disabled all 
of our web templates, and I still get the same behaviour with the 
default web_tt2 templates.  Then I thought it was a problem with the 
database schema.  After all, I may have run a 'sympa.pl --upgrade' or 
two with only INSERT,SELECT,UPDATE,DELETE permissions on the database.  
Finally, I thought there may be a problem with the way we were running 
Apache, and it's sympa permissions.

So, finally I broke down and just built a new test Sympa server.  I have 
a clean install of Sympa 5.4.3.  I dropped the sympa database, and ran a 
rm -rf /home/sympa on the test server.  I have installed Sympa from 
scratch; only have one user in my database; there are no customized web 
templates (tt2 files); the only thing that is really configured on this 
server is generic_sso authentication.

I can provide a debug log.  I wasn't sure about the list policy about 
dumping long logs on the list, without asking first.  If anyone has had 
a similar experience, or has been pulling their hair out, as much as I 
have, trying to troubleshoot this; then I would like to hear about it.

--
Eric G. Wolfe, IT Associate, Sr.
One John Marshall Drive
Marshall University, Drinko Library 428k
Huntington, WV 25755
Phone: 304.696.3428
Email: address@concealed

"You can't have filenames longer than 14 chars.
You can't even think about them!"
                -- Larry Wall in Configure from the perl distribution