Authentication problems due to extended characters used in a password.

  • 7023832
  • 19-Apr-2019
  • 19-Apr-2019

Environment

GroupWise Mobility Service 18
SuSE Enterprise Server 12

Situation

When using LDAP authentication in GroupWise Mobility Service 18, that authentication fails if there are extended ascii characters in the password.  

The line you will see in the mobility-agent.log is this:

2018-09-28 15:35:26.501 ERROR [Device_Thread-32] [DeviceInterface:1942] [userID:] [eventID:] [objectID:] [Server] LDAP Authentication Exception: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Resolution

There is not a resolution for this issue however there are several workarounds.

1.  Use GroupWise authentication 
2.  Do not use extended ascii characters in the passwords
3.  Upgrade to SLES15 using this upgrade documentation.  The server must be at SLES12SP3 or later and the offline upgrade must be used for this to succeed.

Cause

Unfortunately this is a SLES12 defect.  On SLES11 the module is python-ldap, on SLES12 the module is python-pyldap, and on SLES15 module is python2-ldap.  The module on SLES12 is no longer supported by engineering and will not be updated.