My solution was to use token login to handle the actual request. The process is a tad convoluted, but the diagram should explain how the system works:

So the user logs into a remote service, which proxies a username to the Joomla! which is picked up by SSO HTTP in a custom component which generates a token using the detected username, redirects the user to the token login component (not through the proxy) which then lets the user log in and continue through the site.

So what we need to create is a new component to handle detecting the user, creating the token and them redirecting them. We can use the SSO HTTP plugin to handle detecting the remote user perfectly fine (this has already been tested) and the Token Login component can handle validating tokens and redirecting users.

Step 1: Prerequisites
I’m going to use the JAuthTools packages available from Joomla!Code. To install these, you will need to install the Advanced Tools package first before you get started. The latest version is Advanced Tools 1.5.1 available from JoomlaCode.

Once we’ve got the Advanced Tools installed, we’re going to need the JAuthTools 1.5.4 Core package. This will give us the SSO library that we’re going to use later on. We will also need the SSO plugins package (for the SSO HTTP plugin in our case) and the Token Login package. As we’re not using the user source plugins for this case (both LDAP and Session are provided by default) we don’t need to install them and since we’re going to write our own SSO detection component we don’t need to use the options offered by the SSO package.

Once we’ve got all of the prerequisites installed we can start building the component

Step 2: Building the component
So we’ll start building our component with the basic few lines all components require:

This basic check ensures that we’re within Joomla!’s confines or kills the execution if we’re not. From here, lets set up some basic variables:

These are two variables we’re going to use later. The landing page is used for token login to redirect the user to a page once they’ve been authenticated successfully. The autocreate option is utilised by the SSO system to determine if it should automatically create the user. Keep these in mind as we’ll use them later on.

In this next phase we’re going to take a copy of the current user and then use the SSO system to attempt to do the login. If its successful, the user’s ID will change and we can then create a token for them and redirect so they can login, if not we’ll redirect them with an error message:

So we get a reference to the user object, get a copy of the user ID, import the SSO library, create a new SSO authentication object and handle authentication. We see the $autocreate variable we initialised before used here. We could load the plugins ourselves and handle everything but the doSSOAuth call will handle this for us, create the users session and if requested attempt to create the user if they don’t exist. We can then check if the user ID’s are different and then create a token to direct the user back:

A sizable chunk of code. So we check if the user ID has changed (typically from unauthenticated to authenticated, we could also just check if the user ID != 0 as well). We then import the token login library, grab a copy of the database object and then create a new token.

So with the token, we set the username to be that of the currently authenticated user (which we know is correct), set the expiry to be the present time plus an hour. Since this data is only ‘temporary’ we don’t bother with JDate and just use the server time. If the server transitions to or from daylight savings there could be an issue but since the user should be redirected rather quickly that seems like an unlikely possibility. We set the number of logins that the token is valid for, which for this case is only one and then we set the token’s landing page to be the value of $landingpage that we set before. Once we’ve set all of the data we call the ‘store’ function to save all of this to the database which will also trigger the generation of the login token.

Since the session we’re currently in is invalid, we destroy it for a bit of extra security and then we redirect the user to the token login component. Since this request will get proxied as a redirect to the real site (hopefully the proxy doesn’t rewrite the redirect header coming back otherwise this will fail), token login can then authenticate the user (again) and create a session for them without the proxies’ interference. There is however one last part of our component, which is the else case for if the user doesn’t get detected:

So if we don’t detect anything, redirect the user to index.php with the message ‘Invalid SSO Request’. Too easy almost!

So for reference below is the final completed component file, don’t forget to update the values of $landingpage and $autocreate:

The first step in all of this is to install JAuthTools. The Context Login bit is mostly self contained so once you’ve got my Advanced Tools extensions installed you should be able to install the extras package. You can grab the 1.5.1 version of the Advanced Tools extension off Joomla!Code at http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/6797/22390/com_advancedtools.tgz and install directly in Joomla!. The next item we’re going to need is the helper package, the best way to grab this is to install the JAuthTools Core Package from http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9530/36171/pkg_jauthtools_core.tgz which will also give you SSO and User Source libraries as well. The JAuthTools Extras Package contains both the context login module and the Advanced GMail authentication plugin. The extras package also has the LDAP user plugin and the Advanced LDAP plugin but we’re not going to use that today. The current version of the extras package is 1.5.4 (just released!) and you can grab it off JoomlaCode at http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/9530/36195/pkg_jauthtools_extras.tgz and you can also install this directly into Joomla!.

Once you’ve got everything installed, you can get to work. The first place we need to go into the Module Manager in the Administrator and look for Context Login. It’ll be there but it won’t be published by default. Opening it up we’ll see a lot of the params that we know and love from the core built in login module but we’ll also see some params immediately below the caching option called “Contexts”, “Require Context” and “Default Context”. The “Contexts” param is a text field that allows you to enter a per line entry of contexts. In this case we’re going to have two different contexts: one for the main GMail domain (gmail.com) and another for a Google Apps for your Domain (say “yourdomain.com”). Perhaps you’ve got a few of these domains that you want to limit people to so what you can do is enable the “Require Context” option. This will enforce a given context upon the module and remove the ability for the user to be flexible. Keep in mind that this isn’t added with the request, only a context ID is sent which is then looked up and found on the remote site. The last option is the default context to use which is set to -1 initially but can be set to the index of the context (starting from 0). This changes the context select box with the default selected and is purely a cosmetic setting. Once you’ve put in a few domains, you can enable the module and position it somewhere. If you want to put in some extra settings you can also do this like you would do with the normal login module.

The next step is to configure the Advanced GMail plugin. The Advanced GMail has all of the features of the existing GMail plugin and then some. If you’re currently using the GMail plugin, disable it first before you switch to the Advanced GMail plugin. The Advanced GMail plugin has a few configuration options such as “Apply Suffix” (similar to contexts but limited to only a single domain), “Username Suffix” (used with Apply Suffix, a single domain name such as “gmail.com”) , “Verify Peer” is a SSL configuration option that should be left on unless you’re having seriously strange issues (at this point, change host!) and that leaves us with “Use Contexts”. This is a simple option that has “Yes”, “No” and “Require”. What this then causes it to do is look for a context in the request and then apply the context if it finds it. The “Require” option will then enforce the use of contexts and will fail the user if the contxt doesn’t line up properly. The last option is a ‘username’ blacklist. This is a list of usernames that the plugin should never authenticate for which is useful for accounts that you may not control (e.g. ‘admin’) to prevent people logging in using it. This is an extra security feature that I’ve introduced and is certainly recommend using. Enable the plugin and we’re off!

Once both the module is configured and enabled as well as the plugin you should be able to see it in the front end. From here you can see the form and log into to it, selecting your context and then logging in appropriately.

Today is Melbourne Cup day, being the first Tuesday of November, so we had a luncheon of sorts and a drawing for the horses. Didn’t win, the food was good, I’m $10 poorer and such is life.

I’ve been spending more time at work using my Mac as a primary machine. Since I’ve moved to Exchange from Domino (or Outlook from Notes), I’ve gotten Evolution on Linux mostly working (with the exception that it doesn’t automatically look up names for emails which is tedious) and Apple’s Mail and Address Book both playing nicely with Exchange. I do miss the fact that I had Notes on my Linux desktop and things mostly worked albeit slowly and consuming large amounts of memory, but it worked with all of the features available normally. Mail’s ability to due autocompletion is what is drawing me back to it as a client, which when you start writing emails is actually more useful than you would think. Its still not up to par with the Notes autocomplete which was quite cool and a lot more advanced than either Mail’s or Outlook’s (I get Outlook via Citrix).

I’ve also been trying out NetBean’s PHP Early Access through a nightly build (has the ability to create PHP projects from existing sources) and I’m impressed with it. I tried it out because I wanted to try out debugging with my PHP instance and the dated version of Eclipse I had (3.2) seems to have issues – more than likely my fault – and I don’t want to waste time on trying to fix something. NetBean’s installed and worked almost instantly, however it took me a while to find where I could change the params to get J! to route items properly. I managed to work out the bug that I was having without too much issue. I knew what it was but not where it was: turned out to be exactly what I thought, an assignment operator used instead of the append operator. The Subversion support seems to be a bit off and doesn’t work yet, so I’m not quite ready to ditch Eclipse yet – but I’ll try with later versions to see what I get.

I had a chat with the principal (we have principal, manager, director, CEO as our chain of command) about the projects that I’m doing and the ones I’m interested in so I’ll have to do some paperwork and business cases for the new projects and justify items. We’ve recently got a new manager who is trying to find where everything is so part of this is explaining everything so that he can get a grasp of the way the system works.

Then I spent the majority of the afternoon with one of the ITS guys working through how our Citrix boxes work with Flex profiles and the mandatory profiles filling in the gaps in his knowledge and how different parts of the system and why items might break or behave in a particular way. I think he’s worked out how it works and he’s even figured out why a few issues are happening. So nothing exciting but useful.

And finally I had fun with Kerberos. I built the Kerberos module on the SLES10 server, installed it, restarted Apache and tried to get it to work. On my Mac both Safari and Firefox requested a username and password instead of using a Kerberos token and IE6 in my Citrix session seemed to just go in a weird infinite loop. I slowly worked through my entire Kerberos configuration on the server until I got to looking at the keys. It turns out that the keys were created with the wrong virtual host name for the server which is causing the issues. The keys for the real server name actually worked fine when I got around to testing them which proves that everything will work once I get the keys. The last part is a fix to the Citrix system which for some reason think that the intranet site is actually on the internet, but I’m assured that this should be easy to achieve. Getting Kerberos up and running was pretty easy ignoring the faulty keys compared with some of the nightmares I’ve had getting items to play nicely together. I’ll probably add something to my guide (http://sammoffatt.com.au/jauthtools/Kerberos) on it, to help with items.

Who knows, I may have even figured this Kerberos thing out!

I’m also looking at doing some work on the JAuthTools for 1.5 to improve support. There appears to be some issues so I want to get it back up and running as well as porting/merging some of the features from the LDAP SSI into 1.5 and the LDAP Authentication plugin. I’ll probably also do some update to docs on the wiki as well to reflect the new features.

Things on my todo list after I clean up my released JAuthTools plugins:

• Backlink Manager
• JAuthTools Manager
• JDiagnostics for 1.5