After implementing Kerberos Authentication protocol for HCL Connections, as described in the official documentation (HCL Connections and IBM WebSphere documentation) and restarting the whole environment, the “synchronization status” of the Nodes in the IBM WebSphere ISC Console appeared to be “unknown”. All the HCL Connections Applications were running, there were no errors in GUI and the SSO was working without any issues. From the logs of the node agents we could see that the synchronization with the deployment manager was taking place and completing successfully, only in the “SystemOut.log” of the WepSphere deployment manager I found the following error message:
000015c Krb5WSSecurit E SECJ9314E: An unexpected exception occurred when trying to run initSecContext() method : GSSException: org.ietf.jgss.GSSException, major code: 11, minor code: 41
major string: General failure, unspecified at GSSAPI level
minor string: Kerberos error formatting credential for delegation: 41
at com.ibm.security.jgss.i18n.I18NException.throwGSSException(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.security.jgss.mech.krb5.g.a(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.security.jgss.mech.krb5.g.a(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.security.jgss.mech.krb5.g.initSecContext(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.security.jgss.GSSContextImpl.initSecContext(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.security.jgss.GSSContextImpl.initSecContext(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.ISecurityLocalObjectTokenBaseImpl.Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl$1.run(Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl.java:508)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(AccessController.java:770)
at javax.security.auth.Subject.doAs(Subject.java:570)
at com.ibm.ISecurityLocalObjectTokenBaseImpl.Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl.initSecContext(Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl.java:273)
at com.ibm.ISecurityLocalObjectTokenBaseImpl.Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl.initSecContext(Krb5WSSecurityContextImpl.java:157)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.processInternal(SOAPConnectorClient.java:1285)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.getSecurityHeader(SOAPConnectorClient.java:1095)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.invokeTemplateOnce(SOAPConnectorClient.java:783)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.invokeTemplate(SOAPConnectorClient.java:697)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.invokeTemplate(SOAPConnectorClient.java:687)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.queryNames(SOAPConnectorClient.java:599)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnectorClient.invoke(SOAPConnectorClient.java:524)
at com.sun.proxy.$Proxy40.queryNames(Unknown Source)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminClientImpl.queryNames(AdminClientImpl.java:108)
at com.ibm.ws.management.AdminServiceImpl.queryNames(AdminServiceImpl.java:679)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.AdminServiceDelegator.queryNames(AdminServiceDelegator.java:113)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor88.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:55)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:508)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnector.invoke(SOAPConnector.java:503)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnector.service(SOAPConnector.java:335)
at com.ibm.ws.management.connector.soap.SOAPConnection.handleRequest(SOAPConnection.java:65)
at com.ibm.ws.http.HttpConnection.readAndHandleRequest(HttpConnection.java:733)
at com.ibm.ws.http.HttpConnection.run(HttpConnection.java:522)
at com.ibm.ws.util.ThreadPool$Worker.run(ThreadPool.java:1892)
After a quick Google search I found that this boils down to a problem with a hostname defined or spelled in upper case letters. As described in the following article:
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/PM66457
This article also mentions a custom variable which could be set to remedy this issue.
But before trying the custom variable out, I wanted to make sure that this was really the issue. I checked the DNS Server and all SPN records, I could not find any issues there. The output of the “hostname” and “hostnamectl” commands (the whole environment is running on RHEL), were all returning the hostname written in (all) lowercase characters. Only when looking into the “hosts” file of the deployment manager I could find the issue, there was a “127.0.1.1” entry stylized in “CamelCase”. I replaced the upper case letters in the “hosts” file with lower case letters and as soon as I have done that, all the nodes in the ISC console had the status “synchronized” and the error mentioned above did not appear anymore. The custom variable was not needed.
I hope this saves you some time! 🙂
Thoughts about HCL Connections, Domino and Sametime 