SnTT - Does TOTP Work for users in a Secondary Directory via DA

TOTP, DA, and Domino

For the last 3 years, I have worked with TOTP inside HCL Domino and customers with unique requirements.

This has provided fodder for my blog, and today, we have a new entry into the TOTP Mystical Ways of the World.

Let me state my usual caveat upfront: TOTP is about the URL, not the server, the database, or the user.

You enable TOTP for each URL you want on your server.

PSA is completed. Let's discuss the circumstances that brought me here.

Like many of our customers, a customer has a large external user community relying on their applications.

The customer has licensed this with HCL, so I am not going to get involved in that discussion. However, be warned: It is not a comfortable one if you have been relying on some old licensing options and now fall under the new ones.

We have about 7,000 external customers. Some are undoubtedly old customers, but 7,000 is a lot of people.

Previously, I wrote about how to bulk add these people into your ID Vault, and that was all fine and good where we have only one names.nsf for everyone and everything. We may have had 2-3 servers in that org.

Now, the 7,000 are in a secondary external names.nsf via DA (Directory Assistance).

The Problem

1) How do you register and maintain the people in a secondary Directory?

2) Does the DA even work with TOTP? 

The Options I See

Officially, there is only one place, and one place only, where everyone gets registered: the names.nsf.

This is not very helpful, especially given the reliance on the ID Vault for many things these days. By changing licenses, there is no way to "convert non-ID people to Notes ID people."

What do you do?

1) Copy, not replicate, the name.nsf, to extnames.nsf, move the actual names.nsf out of the way, rename extnames to names and then register everyone to it. Once done, put back the original names.nsf and off you go.

As pointed out in our Openntf.org Discord channel, the problem with this is that the user and ID would not be properly found for encryption/certification. This is a very valid point I wasn't thinking about at first. Thank you, Ulrich and Detlev.

2) register all 7,000 into the names.nsf properly, like normal. Then, manually copy the 7,000 to the extnames.nsf. Then delete, just regular delete, not Adminp delete, the 7,000 from the names.nsf.

By doing this, we preserve the user's encryption/certification, and should a name need to be renamed/edited, we can copy the user back and fix it. One could also just create a new account etc.. and remove the bad one from extnames.nsf.

3) Create a new Domain and register everyone to it and cross certify it with the existing domain. This may or may not be the answer as well, depends on circumstances.

4) I have no other idea otherwise. However, there is an AHA idea asking HCL to think about a way to register people to some other .nsf. Take a look and vote over here. 

If anyone has any ideas, let me know in the comments.

I will get to the DA question shortly.

Details and Planning

I started with my blog post and the CSV file I needed with 4 test users.

Copied the 4 test users from the extnames.nsf to the names.nsf.

Went to register the users, verified information etc..

And got this error: "The user's flat name matches another user with a different hierarchical name."

You should know that I ran into a bug in the Notes Admin and Domino Server v12.0.2, which you can read about here. Upgrading the client/server is the basic answer to resolve this one. Since Domino was already at 14.0FP1, my Notes Admin client had yet to be updated. 

Once updated, everything went as it should.

Well, only some things. 

I need to do more testing, but I think the "just updating an existing user" registration option is not working properly because I now have 2 completely different entries for each test user. 

My theory is the existing users being "unregistered web users" with "other mail" were not seen as the same people, and so Domino created the new entries. I know the ways to work around this if it is the case, but more testing will validate what I need to do. After all i will have 7,000 to update, fixing one manually is fine, but all of them? For that, I have my Openntf Admin Snippets to help me. I will blog about this after testing is completed.

In any event, I copied the 4 people out of names.nsf, put them in the extnames.nsf, and reindexed both directories as it was testing time.

Testing TOTP and DA

Ready for testing, I turned on TOTP in the Security setting, edited the domcfg.nsf for the test URL, and checked that the extnames.nsf was enabled in the DA, then restarted Domino.

When Dominno comes up, everything looks okay. I open a browser, put in the URL, and see the login screen with the MFA details. So far, so good.

The first test is my own log-in. I am in the names.nsf, and my ID is in the ID Vault. I passed, and there are no issues.

Log in as one of the new test users for the second test. Invalid password.

It seems, and this may be a customer agent, that the users are not supposed to have a web password. I added there password back, it was in my CSV, and reindexed and tried again.

Different error. User not found type error.

I was logging in as FirstName LastName, which is how I logged in, but there is only one record of me, but 2 of the test users. I logged in with the Org domain name and got one step closer, this time it just crashed on me.

Ok, I cleared the browser cache, restarted Chrome, and tried again.

This time I received a invalid access error.

This is important because the HCL documentation does not say anywhere that the DA will work with TOTP on its own. It only discusses the DA via Cross-Domain Authentication, as you can see here.

I looked at how the DA was set up and changed the Group Authorization setting to Yes from No.

Made sure Trusted for Credentials in the Naming Contexts tab was set to YES.

Then I tried it again.

And it worked this time. I was prompted to set up the MFA and log in as the extnames test user.

Conclusion

I still have more procedures to test and document, but the ability to leverage TOTP in a secondary directory via DA is not a limitation for the rollout. 

SnTT - TOTP Needs an ID file in the ID Vault to Work, What if some are Missing?

Yes, of course, a properly managed Domino environment should have been using the ID Vault for several years now.

But we all have customers who, for one reason or another, just never did it, or worse, think they did but never check that it worked.

And then we hear from them out of the blue to help get TOTP installed and update their environment.

No big deal, right? Set up the ID Vault, and when people log in to their Notes client, their ID files get sent to the ID Vault. Newly registered people are also automatically added to the ID Vault.

But what do you do about people who solely use webmail/iNotes?

How do you get their IDs into the ID Vault?

This, I thought, would be an easy thing, but it turned out to be way more effort than first thought.

One option is to select the user in the Directory with the names.nsf open, right-click on their person document, and select upload ID to the ID Vault. A similar Action from the top menu bar option can be found in the Admin client when the Directory is not open.

Not so fast. 

First, the option and action did not appear. Second, even if they did appear, we had 2 problems: where were these people's ID files and the better issue was who had the passwords? 

When you upload ID files to the ID Vault, Domino asks for the password for the file being uploaded, and if it does not match, you are out of luck.

We could not resolve the 2nd problem. More on that in a minute.

The first problem, I reached out to HCL Support to find out what happened to the action/agents.

Turns out they were in the template but not in the database.

After reviewing it with HCL, we found the customer had edited the People view of the Directory and set it to not update with changes from future templates.

I changed that setting in Designer and the properties of the view, then ran a replace design on the Directory, restarted the server, and it now worked and showed the action/agent items.

Now, back to the ID problem.

How can one register new users optimally without wiping out all their details in their existing person document?

I figured I needed to look at registering people with a text file and how to do it without changing their existing internet password or wiping out their mail file.

11 years ago, I wrote this post, https://blog.vanessabrooks.com/2010/06/id-registration-via-text-file.html, waiting for the moment it would be helpful again.

Well, that day has come. However, to be fair, I have used it a few times over the years.

I also searched for how to create a user but not a mail file. I did not get an answer to this in my searches or when asking some people, so I decided I just had to work around the issue. If anyone knows, please let me know in the comments, and I will edit this post accordingly.

Using the spreadsheet I created in 2010, I started figuring out what the syntax should be to complete this.

After a few tests, ok, maybe a few more tests, I realized I needed to maintain the file names but change the file directory. That way, dummy mail files would be created, which could be deleted, saving their existing mail files. However, the person document would now show the wrong location for the person's mail. Hang on, we will fix that soon too.

These people needed ID files in the ID Vault but would never use them otherwise. The ID files require a password, but we do not want it to synch with their internet password because that would overwrite their existing one. Domino has a way to help us do this, too; the explanation is below.

What does this spreadsheet look like before you copy the text to a .txt file? I figured I only needed to use a few fields, and this is what I used just 6 fields:

LAST    FIRST    PASSWORD    FILE DIRECTORY    FILENAME    EMAIL

Now the fun part is you need a semi-colon (;) after any entry you want to enter, so my text file for registration ended up looking like 250 of these(see the 11-year-old blog post for details on what goes in what order if you need more fields):

Brooks;Keith;;;PASSWORD;;;;mail2;kbrooks.nsf;;;;;;keith@b2bwhisperer.com;

But you need one more essential thing before starting the registration process for everyone.

If you click on options from the Registration window menu, 

you will want to check the line that says "Allow Registration of previously registered people," and check the "Don't prompt for a duplicate person" option, and select the most important option, "Update the existing address book entry.

When you use these settings, Domino will not stop for every duplicate user and just change precisely what we tell it to change in the person document.

In the registration form, you should ensure your ID Vault policy is set up for everyone.

As discussed earlier, we don't want to overwrite any existing Internet passwords; thus, you need to click on Password Options and uncheck "Set Internet Password"; otherwise, you will write over their current Internet password. HINT: Back up your Names.nsf before doing this, so if you do screw it up, you can get it all back quickly.

In the Mail tab of registration, you set the mail template to use and leave the mail file name field with just the directory name. The .txt file handles this.

Set the expiration date you want to use for everyone you are creating on the ID Info tab.

Now you import your .txt file, and Domino will tell you if any of them have syntax issues.

Domino will then let you know if anyone had issues or how many were completed when you ran it.

Please test with 2-3 people first, making sure all fields and entries look right, and the mail file is created where you specified.

How do we change the mail file locations, which now were mail2 instead of mail for 250 people out of 500?

A few months back, I started adding scripts to Openntf.org under the snippets Admin Scripts area to help other admins and for just this purpose. 

I took one of the scripts, adapted it for the Mail File location field, and then selected the users to run it on, and in seconds they were all back to normal. 

I posted that new script as well in case anyone will need to do this at the openntf site here.

Afterward, we had a few issues:

• Some people we were told were solely web users were not. This meant they lost their ID certificate and could not log in. Easy enough to fix by copying the new certificate into their person document and replacing the old one. 
• A few people in our spreadsheet had mistyped an email or mail file name and a few similar names and file names that got by us in editing. Easily fixed, we had a backup to verify what they should have in their fields.

And there you have it. I know it sounds like a lot, but really, it is not that big of a deal.