how alfresco session work

[oscar_2016]

We are running  alfresco on Windows 2008  and using Windows integrate  authentication (Windows sso)   Our  users are  working  and  suddenly  the authentication pop-up  comes up

[ddraper]

What version of Alfresco are you using?

[oscar_2016]

We  are using  alfresco  enterprise  4.2.4 on Windows  2008 R2 and  using  NTLM  sso

Thanks.

[amukha]

Hi, could you please add some details about your use case?
Are the clients using a browser? If they are, then which one?
Do you know if this use case worked before?

Just having the information that your clients are using NTLM SSO and these clients are successfully accessing Alfresco and after a while they have to log in again, probably means that their session has expired and it has to be renewed.

[oscar_2016]

We are using IE  11

what’s happening is that for some users
they are constantly being prompted to enter their user credentials.
Regardless if the user enters their credentials or not the pop up will
continuosly appear thus not letting the user use Alfresco.  The page usually
freezes and users have to close their browsers if they can as the page is “Not
Responding” or reboot their computer.  Once they go back into Alfresco it
will work for a while then the pop will appear again and the process
repeats.  I’ve had this happen to me while I was given a presentation in a
boardroom.  The first hour I had no issues then all of a sudden I was
prompted to to enter my user credentials which I did to no avail.  I
couldn’t access Alfresco for roughly 30 minutes as I was constantly being asked
to enter my credentials even after I rebooted.  This was the first time
I’ve experienced the issue first hand as I’ve never had the issue occur on my
desktop.  For some of the users this happens regularly throughout the day.
The pop up will appear at any time regardless of the task the user is
doing.

Typically once it happens and you close your browser and try to open it
again the pop will appear soon as you click on the link.

It  looks like
for  any    reason the session is  broken
(expired) so  Alfresco  requires  authentication, user
enter  credentials   but  alfresco  is  unable to
authentication  entering  Windows  credentials this
kind  of  authentication s  has not been  set up what
is  set up  is  SSO  .. 

[amukha · Accepted solution]

Thanks for clarifications.

The behaviour you are seeing is probably a bad configuration in Alfresco or connectivity problems between Alfresco and Active directory server.
If NTLM SSO is properly configured, the client should never see the log in box.

The problems can be troubleshooted by adding additional logging (or probably observing the existing logs) of Alfresco.
A couple of useful filters for log4j:
Alfresco side:

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.web.app.servlet.NTLMAuthenticationFilter=debug

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.repo.webdav.auth.NTLMAuthenticationFilter=debug

Share side:

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter=debug