5 Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting your install

Most of the time, problems surrounding getting your application working with this plugin are attributed to the "Shibboleth SP > mod_shib > Apache > mod_jk > Tomcat" stack.

A demo application

To help you see what your servlet container can see and help you diagnose problems, I have created a shibboleth-demo application that you can compile and deploy. It will give you a pretty good view of what is going on within your servlet container.

You can get the application from github. The command to clone it to your local machine is:

git clone git@github.com:aaronzirbes/grails-shibboleth-demo.git

You can build it by running:

grails war shibdemo

...and then deploy it to your shibboleth aware servelt container (tomcat).

Configuration of exposed attributes

If you've deployed the demo application, you can see all of the exposed attributes from your server. You should double-check these to make sure that these attributes match what is set in your Config.groovy file.

Log files

Often you can check the log files to see what's going on with your server. Useful log files include

• /var/log/shibboleth/*.log
• /var/log/tomcat6/*.log
• /var/log/apache/*.log
• /var/log/syslog

Grails Loggging

You can enable debug level logging in grails by adding the following to your grails-app/conf/Config.groovy file

log4j = {
	…
    debug  'edu.umn.shibboleth.sp'
	…
}

org.springframework.security.ldap
org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.springsecurity.ldap

Other languages

Sometimes it's helpful to write a simple script in another language to see if apache can see the attributes exposed from shibboleth. Anything will work really. PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc...

Usually the following PHP script (index.php) is sufficient to see all the shibboleth attributes.

<? php phpinfo(); ?>

Check the resources

If all else fails, check the Resources section, this has links to quite a bit of documentation. You can also try posting your question to the mailing lists.

If you've found a bug in the application, or have a feature you want that it doesn't support, please feel free to submit an issue via the GitHub page, and I'll see what I can do to help.