August 21 2008 Thursday

Quickr on Domino with Create Members

We've been using Lotus Quickr for Domino internally for ages. I even went to one of the first STEWs (Software Technical Enablement Workshops) when 8.0 first came out. At STS we love it. We have even installed a ton of Quickr server for clients. But one of the things that never worked internally here at STS was the Image:Quickr on Domino with Create Membersoption. I always figured it didn't work because we switched form LDAP to Domino and back so many times it confused the hell out of Domino and Quickr! We have a lot of places so I wasn't going to reinstall unless we lost the VMWare instance.

Image:Quickr on Domino with Create Membersallows you to add users only for that place and it doesn't add them to the Domino Directory. Very cool. Except for the longest time it just wouldn't work. Well yesterday one of our business development people asked about sharing files with some IBM folks and they wanted to use Quickr.

I decided to try again so I did a Image:Quickr on Domino with Create Membersand added a new user to a place....for arguments sake lets call them "place user1". I'd then open the quickr URL (http://url_to_quickr/) in a browser and try and log in as "place user1" it would fail, every single time:

Image:Quickr on Domino with Create Members
This was "normal" behavior for our Quickr servers and was about to give up and register the user via Domino admin (i.e., create a real Notes ID) which always worked. Never on to give up (one day I will blog about VMWare and the cat!) I had an idea. "What if I went to the place directly, http://url_to_quickr/placename"? Well what do you know, it logged me in as "place user1". Successfully. As it was supposed to. But just never did. Ever. Since then both http://url_to_quickr/ and http://url_to_quickr/placename both seem to work!

I'm not totally sure the above was responsible, but nothing on the server has changed or even restarted (indeed, the quickr server has been up 55 days, and this is on W32!).
Darren Duke   |   August 21 2008 09:00:00 AM   |    quickr    |  
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Comments (5)

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1 - Scott Marchione    http://scottmarchione.blogspot.com    08/21/2008 12:42:01 PM

HA! I just encountered this exact issue yesterday at a training class for Quickr! The instructor couldn't log in with the generic ID created when she tried to hit the main URL, but during the lunch break she was able to log into the specific place, and after that all was well... So don't feel bad, it can happen to anyone, even those who write the class materials for IBM!

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2 - Darren Duke    http://blog.darrenduke.net    08/21/2008 3:48:28 PM

So I guess that is what made it work then.

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3 - Sasa Brkic    http://www.cs-computing.com/    08/22/2008 3:43:50 AM

We have also experienced similar problems and traced them to Session Authentication.

If we enable either Single or Multiple Servers authentication, local users are not able to log-in. Disable authentication and everything works fine.

Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly enough time to read the manual, so this may be correct behaviour.

We may have also missed some setting.

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4 - Darren Duke    http://blog.darrenduke.net    08/22/2008 8:32:41 AM

@3. Strange indeed. But you need to use session auth in order to set up the custom login page. That login page is what is supposed to allow for the creation of place-only users. In your domcfg.nsf you point to:

database path: lotusquickr/resources.nsf

and

form name: QuickPlaceLoginForm

When you add this most of the authentication issues around Quickr (on Domino) go away....except the the issue outlined in the post. Onward and upward!

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5 - Sasa Brkic    http://www.cs-computing.com/    08/23/2008 6:01:50 AM

Darren,

As feared, it was our mistake - we misconfigured domcfg.nsf.

Thanks for pinpointing the possible cause and making troubleshooting so easy!