Troubleshooting : BOARD Web Authentication fails

Board Support

This article is applicable from BOARD 10 onwards

 

Overview

We live in a world where people, machines and devices are always connected. In this scenario the time is inherently important to the function of services and networks. It provides the only frame of reference between all devices on the network. This makes synchronized time extremely important. Without synchronized time, accurately correlating information between devices becomes difficult, if not impossible. When it comes to security, if you cannot successfully compare authorization tokens between your network servers, you will find it very hard to authenticate clients. Time servers are essential in many security-related transactions, including log time-stamping and certificate validation. It is important to use a centralized time server and synchronize all systems with the same time server.

 

The Problem

If you have authentication problem and after the login page you get a blank page with the url containing a string like "/Callback.html#id_token" it means your authentication token has expired.
This happens because the BOARD server and the User's laptop have a time difference. This happens because the security token sent by the Sever to the browser has an expiration time, and the time difference existing between the Server and the User's laptop is enough to force its expiry.

 

Solution

Set your Server and Computer network to be synchronized with an external pool of NTP time server.

NTP is designed to synchronize the time on a network of machines. NTP runs over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

All OS can be set to use NTP servers for time management.

An NTP network usually gets its time from an authoritative time source, such as a radio clock or an atomic clock attached to a time server, and then distributes this time across the network.

 

For more information about NTP and the link to ntp pools servers see:

http://www.pool.ntp.org