Help setting up shibboelth 2.5.4 sp with shared session db

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/27/15, 1:51 PM, "users on behalf of Ewing, Bill" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of BEwing at utsystem.edu> wrote:

>We are making progress with the database setup but had to tweak the settings some.

Well, no, so that's a good sign something you set up is incorrect.

>Forwarding from the dba assisting us 
>"The documentation says that 3 of the columns on strings table should have length of 255, but the log is showing that its trying to insert 4000 character length...so I went ahead and increased to 4000.

No, the strings table is entirely separate from the texts table and it will *not* try and do that to the strings table. It just won't. So that sort of casts some doubt on your set up here.

>The problem is I had to remove the primary key on strings based on two of those fields because it surpasses the max length of a primary key....well, not necessarily a problem...not sure what shib needs the primary key for as there is no defined relationships between the other tables"

That also is not going to work. The primary key is required to enforce uniqueness and to provide an index, and it MUST be exactly what the documentation says it is, it's a two part key. Both the context and id columns are 255, so there is no issue here with key size.

You won't get anything resembling correct behavior with a different DDL unless it's just tweaking data types in syntactic ways for different databases (e.g. LONGTEXT instead of text).

> After that are running into an issue when shibd is starting the sessioncache into the database. After login the database starts getting entries written to it then shibd crashes. After setting logs to debug I see this in the logs. I truncated the statement unless its helpful to paste the whole thing?

Not really, that's a routine insert. Notice it says "texts" there, that table is defined with a text data type on the values column, to accomodate the length.

>So it looks like shib is crashing before or during the insert statement into the texts table since there are no rows in that table in the database (shib does insert rows into strings table by this point).  So I pulled the information from the debug and tried to insert through the unixODBC sql tool and it succeeds without a problem.
>
>Are we running into some of the bugs you mentioned with odbc drivers or might there be something else were missing?

I doubt it. I'll look a stack trace, but I would say that all the talk about having to change the DDL is a better culprit, but if it's crashing, that's a bug. Probably an unexpected error based on a misconfiguration of the database.

-- Scott