Edit wiki, unitedid IdP auth fails due to missing OTP

[John Dennis]

On 8/19/19 7:51 PM, Cantor, Scott wrote:
> On 8/19/19, 7:43 PM, "users on behalf of John Dennis"
> <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of jdennis at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> How do I set up the OTP for unitedid?
> 
> It was built-in when I did it. If you just access
> https://unitedid.org/ and login there, does it still prompt?

To make a long story short, I got it to work, but ...

In all candor https://unitedid.org/ web site has a poor user interface. 
The home page is basically is a large white page with a large logo and 
two large buttons: "Learn More" and "Sign up". Not believing I had an 
account there I clicked on "Sign up" and filled out the form, but after 
submitting the form I got a stack trace with with a database error 
"duplicate key, email address not unique" with my personal email (that's 
really unacceptable for a public front facing system). Hmm... so I must 
have signed up previously, but how do I check my account info? If you 
click on either the "Learn More" or "Sign up" buttons you won't find any 
navigation to manage your profile, it's completely absent.

So tried with my work email, same problem. Then later (quite a bit 
later) I got an email saying my account was inactive, would I like to 
reset my password? The "Learn more" button wasn't much help either, zero 
information on managing your account, setting up OTP or much of anything 
else either.

What I kept missing on the home page is a tiny text link in the upper 
right hand corner completely disjoint and disconnected from the rest of 
the page saying "Manage My profile". Ah ha! If you click that link you 
can setup a security token, I chose Google Authenticator (time based), 
created my token, got confirmation emails, and then was able to 
authenticate to the wiki using the OTP from Google Authenticator.

My personal take is unitedID is not ready for production. If you click 
on "Sign up" it will display a "Beta" banner, me thinks that might be an 
understatement :-)

> 
>> Is there a non multi-factor unitedid selection available for the
>> wiki login?
> 
> We aren't requesting it, they just do whatever they do.
> 
>> Any other way to edit the wiki if you're not a federation member?
> 
> I would imagine you could contact them for assistance perhaps. All
> the other open options I know about are gone or defunct. Most
> universities could issue guest accounts and I could get somebody to
> if you really wanted, though OSU has overly invasive requirements for
> personal information to get one.

Until such time as unitedID improves their web experience my suggestion 
would be to add a bit of help information to wiki authentication page 
where it points you to unitedID.

-- 
John Dennis