How do I update my SSO/Siteminder files to work with Jira 6.0.1 from 4.4.3?

Manohar Venkataraman June 6, 2013

We recently went live in Production with Jira 4.4.3 after figuring out the changes required to get it to work with SSO/Siteminder were 4 files:

  • seraph-config.xml /prod/sys/jira/install/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/classes
  • web.xml /prod/sys/jira/install/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/
  • server.xml /prod/sys/jira/install/conf
  • Created: CustomJiraSecurity.jar /prod/sys/jira/install/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib

Because 4.4.3 is ancient I'm looking to upgrade us to 6.0.1 ASAP. The upgrade went fine, however on trying to update these files I can no longer get SSO to work. In rummaging around the internet I found some reference to opensymphony no longer being supported from 5.0 onwards. Does anyone have an idea of what I need to do to update these files/jar in order to work with 6.0.1? (Please bear in mind I'm a QA guy, so looking for some techie reference material I can pass along to our infrastructure team to do the heavy lifting).

3 answers

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Manohar Venkataraman June 13, 2013

Just had a breakthrough in that the Infrastructure team rebuilt the customauthenticator jar and we are now able to access Jira through Siteminder. There are a number of errors in the log and can't access the marketplace but I'm sure those will be easier issues to fix. I asked for help from a related question and did receive this from Tim Theis which I will try out to see if eliminates any of the log issues:

I upgraded from 4.x to 5.2.5 a couple months ago, but still using a custom authenticator for SSO with Siteminder. The only thing that was required to change in order to get it to work was adding a new parameter into the seraph-config.xml (insert new login.forward.path) as indicated below:

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<security-config>
<parameters>
...
<!--
The path to *forward* to when the user tries to POST to a protected resource (rather than clicking on
an explicit login link). Note that this is done using a servlet FORWARD, not a redirect. Information
about the original request can be gotten from the javax.servlet.forward.* request attributes.
At this point you will probably want to save the user's POST params so he can log in again and retry
the POST.
Defaults to undefined, in which case Seraph will just do a redirect instead of a FORWARD.
-->
<init-param>
<param-name>login.forward.path</param-name>
<param-value>/secure/XsrfErrorAction.jspa</param-value>
</init-param>
...
<parameters>
</security-config>
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Yves Martin
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June 11, 2013

Probably the better implementation consists in a Servlet Filter that get username from Siteminder HTTP header and pass it to JIRA standard authenticator as request.getRemoteUser() thanks to a HttpServletRequestWrapper.

In that case, server.xml and seraph-config.xml are kept unmodified and all the job can be done thanks to a single class file.

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Yves Martin
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June 11, 2013

If web.xml is changed, probably a custom filter is deployed. If seraph-config.xml is modified, I guess you have a custom authenticator... The reason why it no longer works is not obvious without having access to your source code. By the way, minor tuning should be enough to get it fixed.

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