[Freeipa-users] Fw: Web ui error “Your session has expired. Please re-login.” from a browser on a remote client.

[Martin Kosek]

On 04/27/2015 06:09 PM, Christopher Lamb wrote:
> 
> Hi All
> 
> I may have found a possible cause of our instance of the  "Your session has
> expired" Web UI error on our new FreeIPA 4.1.0 Server
> 
> By chance I checked the date on the server hosting FreeIPA 4.1.0. To my
> surprise, despite running ntpd it was 2 hours in the future!
> 
> Some moons ago we suffering from clock-skew problems, and had spent a lot
> of time understanding ntp, and setting up an optimal ntp
> architecture /config. We were able to completely eliminate clock-skew
> across all our servers.
> 
> Digging into the /etc/ntp.conf file I saw that FreeIPA had replaced our 4
> NTPD servers with 4 RedHat NTPD servers.
> 
> Therefore I returned the /etc/ntp.conf file to our default, restarted ntpd,
> and time was correct again.
> 
> Subsequent to this (at least at various points today) I have been able to
> successfully log into the Web UI from Firefox and Safari on OSX, and
> Firefox on Windows. On both platforms Chrome (not supported) does not work.
> 
> I confess I have not had the time to return to the FreeIPA ntp config to
> see if the 2 hour offset + Web UI session problem can be reproduced, so at
> the moment this remains a credible, but not proven hypothesis.
> 
> However I guess that  2 hour offset probably comes from the 2 hour
> difference between UTC and European Summertime.
> 
> I think it would be great if the changes made by FreeIPA setup to ntp.conf
> were optional - we care strongly about the content of that file!
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Chris

Good to know. I updated the Troubleshooting page with this tip:
https://www.freeipa.org/page/Troubleshooting#Cannot_authenticate_to_Web_UI

Thanks!
Martin