HTTPS with Webservices in Livelink

Contrary to stuff that I do this post is basically something I hacked together to make it work.I must have received at least 50 emails for several web services questions.In the absence of OT providing good easy to understand hand holding examples I offer these.If OT ‘s thinking is basically to code a web service a developer needs to take paid training all those things have come to pass.Almost every programming language snippets are available and so there is an expectation that the Vendor provides proper code samples.What I think they should start putting quality samples like what Jason is attempting &  conducting webinars .They could do several official things such as how to code when RCS is present, what is the difference between Enterprise Library Services & Livelink web services,How does the new OTDS come into authenticationg into livelink,What one should do and not do,many things the livelink programming community needs help on.This in my mind will ensure a good talent pool of programmers out there who would do things as OT intends to.

I naturally like to understand what I am doing unfortunately in this installment I have resorted to mostly ‘trial & error’

HTTPS and Livelink Web Services code

As we learned on our SSO attempt and livelink web services this time we start with this

Part 1

1. Make VM IPv4 and disable IPv6 it should work for IPv6 provided you do the stuff in my previous blog.
2. Make sure the IIS7 livelink webserver is functioning fine
3. Make sure anonymous(livelink) authentication is fine  i.e.’ we can login as the powerful ‘Admin’ and the right password.
4. Now with our baseline favorite Kyle Swidrowich’s piece of code start making it work without https
5. We then make IIS HTTPS. Note you cannot make a webserver https commercially without shelling some money.HTTPS needs a certifying authority. For purposes of demonstration I will be using Microsoft’s self-signing certificate. Self-signing certificates are the same secure protocol other than the fact that a commercial company will not stand by it. Products such as archive server uses self-signing certs and OT bundles a signer program so I have used it many times to create closed loops between SAP ,livelink and archive server. For the completely uninitiated a secure transmission means only with the private key can you decipher the communication between the browser and the application so snooping with fiddler/wire shark etc. will give you a lot of garbled messages.
6. So we manage to login as HTTP on that livelink

Again VC#, At this point this looks promising, Now add quickly DocumentManagemnt.svc and ContentService.svc as well Try Kyle’s code and make it work for HTTPS .Perfect everything works we added the document

Part 2

Making IIS HTTPS

I used this site and followed that

see how simple it was for me a non MS/IIS person to figure this out that is what we sadly lack with OT.

BTW word press cannot do embedded images from my word document.I have the word document replete with screen caps in communities.

And this Now for good measure we need to remove http

If you remember a posting I made and Guy Pomerleaux commented if you have http and https running and OT web services code  is accessed you don’t really know you are talking https unless you do this. To keep it simple my livelink is now HTTPs Web GUI or web services. Perhaps if you leave a http listening port this would make your coding easier, but since I am doubtful which protocol will be used I resort to this.My builder program reports HTTPS=on that tells me everything is SSL.

We say yes to the IE warning and proceed to our newly created Livelink website which is now on HTTPS

We have cert errors even after we import the cert to keep IE happy

But I guess it will complain until I paid VeriSign or Thawte some money Perhaps readers can pool some money and buy me a certificate J for all practical purposes I am https

When I try to change my web service references we get this

I say yes

I got this and plenty of yellow looking errors at the livelink web services server when I tried to call the web service. Too many to list and too unknowing to comment on the mumbo jumbo.Essentially at this point I am trying on the server to get this service created.

https://appuw2k8vm/les-services/Authentication.svc

Several errors ensued which I basically got around by removing all traces of places I thought was written for HTTP stuff.

So I remembered form my 9.7.1 that there is some SSL binding stuff we have to do on the web services on the server. So we make a copy of the Web.Config and try it.

Mostly if you remove everything that did not contain SSL and enable the SSL stuff it should work.

Also could not establish trust relationship means you have to install the certificate into the trusted certificate store

A working Web.Config you can find a working app.config you can also find. I am not able to explain the mumbo jumbo as it is mostly trial and error. I hope if any OT knowledgeable people read this they would conduct a webinar on how to do this.

Link 1 The above article replete with screen caps as a word doc

Link 2 The Web.Config that goes on the web services install that works for me 

Link 3 The App.Config from my C# application

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Single Sign On and Content Web Services for a livelink server

04/28/2016 Why am I keeping this ?This is obsolete like hell

04/17/2013 APPU—–NOTE THIS IS OUTDATED INFORMATION BUT SETUP WISE IT WILL HELP.

IF YOU ARE ON A UPDATE LEVEL 9 AND UP YOUR EXPERIENCES WILL GREATLY BE IMPRESSED

IF YOU ARE A NOVICE TO INTEGRATED WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION (IF YOU RUN LIVELINK IN WINDOWS IIS AND USE AD FOR THAT)LEARN THAT FROM THE WEB AND UNDERSTAND THAT LIVELINK USES THAT UNDER THE COVERS(OSCRIPT CODE IN DIRECTORY SERVICES MODULE) TO GRANT YOU SINGLE SIGN ON.I AM YET TO TRY MY HANDS ON JAVA BASED OTDS(RCS) BASED DIRECTORY SERVICES

Many users who know me from my contributions ask me to write code that helps with their livelink problems.In many cases it is very new programmers who get assigned to write these.They expect almost without success to find snippets of livelink webservice code thru google etc.I have not frankly understood programmer hurry like this but when you program it does not hurt to put a rational outline on what you are trying to do.In any case OT official dom is very notorious for non hand holding.In fact when I first started writing Dr Lapi I seriously doubt if there was a working sample of lapi code you could find in the web.Now that they have started to tell people not to use LAPI they need to put a lot of working examples as a livelink implementation can become very complicated over years of use and maturity.Also customization can alter ways of its working.

SSO or single sign on is not impersonation in livelink.If you have a ID in livelink with System Admin privileges it is very easy to gain access to livelink and do things as another user.While that sounds very insecure the actions are all audited.It is available in Unix,MS and many other applications hence impersonation is nothing to be considered as lowly.However I take exception when you advertise impersonation as SSO.

SSO is mostly applied to a company Intranet.When people and computers need to be managed they would employ a directory server which usually understands the LDAP protocol.In MS centred organization you would hear as Active Directory,in novell it is NDS,in IBM it may be a Domino or is it Tivoli? server,in SUN /ORACLE places it could be their ldap server.When you sign into a domain held computer unbeknownst to you you have established a trust between your device and the company network.So any other application need to trust you for what you are.that is proper SSO.In web application when you hit a IWA enabled website your browser exchanges a 401 challenge which when successful will populate certain environment variables the famous one REMOTE_USER.In a proper livelink SSO exchange we take that env variable and sign you in.In the livelink database such a user would be called a ‘Externally Authenticated’ user.

Well here’s how I got my CS10 Update 6 VM working with SSO code.I write a long word document detailing my challenges but this is the best short way I can give to the community.My research material is uploaded in the communities web site.In retrospect OT is expecting you to use the OTDS java web server maybe to get applications to integrate.That is when you hear terms such as RCS etc.

LIVELINK SETUP

1. I configured otdsintegration to use webserver authentication.Meaning otdsintegration oscript module allows you a radio button to do web server authentication.I did not configure OTDS(RCS) as I do not have a domain and AD in my VM.
2. I made the IIS VD for livelink IWA
3. I checked whether I could login as my domain user in my case my user called ‘Administrator’ I verified what admin.testargs passed in to me
4. I downloaded old directory services code and installed it luckily there was aversion for CS10.I had to because the otdsintegration module gets you web authentication but not web services authentication.
5. I put my computer on IPv4 to first test it
6. I made these changes to my opentext.ini
7. [Security]
8. #REM when you install directory services module you can get this ospace
9. Authentication=NTLM
   #REM when IPV6 is installed the crazy looking things is a oscript bug and its defeat by me found thru builder
   CGIHosts=::ffff:127.0.0.1,fe80::2d54:a6cb:b5d2:b145%11 I think the code is looking for socket.pPeeraddress
10. which is the address of the client in fact they should not do that but in IPv4 it is all OK
    #REM127.0.0.1 is added by livelink code but the computers IPv4 address
    #CGIHosts=
11. the Web.Config changed for NTLM for the livelink webservices  application

CLIENT CODE C# SETUP

1. App.Config reflected to the same NTLM auth as in Web.Config
2. Added System.IO
3. That is about it.

Client stack traces are almost impossible to understand unless you understood livelink code.Since I understood it and was able to understand what they were doing I am providing this.Your setup could vary I have no clue.

Link 1-Interested programmers could see my setup for CS10U6 here—

Link2-The C# solution containing a basic piece of code Kyle Swidrowich Created which I repurposed 🙂

Link3-Livelink Web.Config tthat you have to do for webservices

Link4-My experience when Livelink was 9.7.1wanted to write SSO code