Hi,

Thank you for those notes, I will look into them, they'll be useful for
the future.

We have solved the problem now, a colleague tried to manually login to
the network using the test*** account which is used to authenticate (see
*.properties files). It seems the stored password didn't work. Resetting
the password re-enabled the authentication and now all is well. Obvious
when you think about it, but not when you don't know BB inside out.

We will have to investigate, if possible, who/why this password was
changed and lock it down (and possibly shoot someone). It's a shame
these passwords are held in plain text in BB configs.

Thanks again

Neal
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Shen, Dr J. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 30 September 2005 13:47
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Blackboard down - Authentication issue??

Have you ever created an account that is authenticated by BB (with
auth.type.ldap.user_not_found_fallback_to_bb=true)? To see log entries
for authentication activities, you need to change
blackboard.service.log.param.logdef.default.verbosity in
\blackboard\config\service-config.properties from "warning" to "debug".
You can then check \blackboard\logs\bb-services-log.txt for
login/authentication log entries.

Jie

-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Palmer, Neal
Sent: 30 September 2005 12:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Blackboard down - Authentication issue??


Hi all,

Since about 11.30am this morning, we have been experiencing an
unpleasant Blackboard-down scenario with the error message "Could not
login. Valid authentication credentials were not provided." We use LDAP
against MS Active Directory, running BB v6.2 on Windows 2000.

Normally this works just fine, nothing has changed as far as I am aware,
indeed as a Sys Admin I stay as far away as possible from Blackboard
just to be sure!

I've rebooted both our Web/App and Database servers (not scientific but
usually works), successfully manually restarted services
(servicecontroller.bat), checked event logs, successfully connected to
SQL databases (ODBC - they look fine!) looked through all the BB log and
I cannot find anything that gives me any clues as to we cant login. 

I left a message saying 'priority 1' on Blackboard's answerphone(!) 3/4
hour ago and have heard nothing yet, so I wondered if any Sys Admins out
there might have any further troubleshooting ideas?

Specifically I guess Im after a log file which says 'I cant authenticate
you because...'

Thanks for any help!

Neal


---------------------------------------------------------------
Neal Palmer
Senior Technical Support Officer

Systems and Communications
Information Services Division
UWIC
Cardiff
Wales
CF5 2YB
---------------------------------------------------------------