Shibboleth DSpace 7.6.1

[Gigawwad Web-Solutions]

 We updated from DSpace 7.6 to 7.6.1 and now a strange error has occured. The JavaScript Console says after successful authentication that there might be an undefined object (see screenshot).
           
Do you know anything about this error?
           
Information
      - /server/api is reachable
      - Shibboleth.sso shows active session
      - Session Cookies are set
           
Server
      - Apache2 + mod_shib / mod_proxy
      - Log shows following message:
           
 2023-11-22  unknown unknown org.dspace.authenticate.ShibAuthentication @ te...@test.ch has been authenticated via shibboleth.

Thank you and best regards

[darryl....@usask.ca]

I came here to ask about this exact thing!!!  We also just upgraded to 7.6.1 with Shib auth.

In my Chrome console I see several instances of the dreaded "No _links section found" error after Shibboleth authentication occurs.  Everything on the frontend is displaying perfectly, so I don't think it's the normal misconfigurations documented in the DSpace wiki that typically cause the no _links error (and usually prevent the entire site from working).  I think this is specific to the authentication/shibboleth component.  I believe this is failure is the cause of the error messages you posted.  The API calls the auth/shib component makes seem to fail or somehow get an unexpected response, that response does not have the _links section, the errors you posted get generated, and (to the user) login just appears to silently fail.  In the Apache logs, my Shib ID is recorded for all requests, and as you said, if I look at the Shib status, Shib also says I'm logged in.

- Darryl

[Ed Hill]

We're also experiencing this on our dev server, basically exactly as described, "No _links section found" and apparent silent failure after successful Shibboleth login. After a couple of hard refreshes it seems to catch up and finally complete the login process. The behavior is intermittent but frequent.

 

We're also seeing a problem with the interaction of IP authentication groups and Shibboleth-based groups; the Shibboleth based groups never get applied if the user also gets IP-based groups, the ShibAuthentication class's getSpecialGroups method just returns early with "Returning cached special groups." which are the IP-based groups. If I remove the IP Authentication plugin in local.cfg then the Shibboleth group gets applied. I'm going to do some more testing on this one and probably submit an issue, I don't know the backend code well enough to understand everything happening.

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi all,

I believe this issue may already have a ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/2669  As noted in that ticket, the issue doesn't seem to happen every time, but is happening a significant amount of time -- specifically for Shibboleth.

A fix is in progress in this PR: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/pull/2670   This PR is brand new, so it requires thorough testing still.  But, if you are impacted and want to help us test this PR, we'd appreciate hearing whether it fixes the issue for you.  If you do test the PR, please report your results on that PR (as a comment).  If we find it works for many, this will help us move it forward quickly. 

Thanks,

Tim