SUM authentication issue with saphostctrl – Authentication Required

[tenbussa]

We are trying to start the Software Update Manager (SUM) 1.0 SP20 PL4 on an Netweaver 7.02 Sandbox with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and DB2 (DB6).

We extracted the SUM package to /usr/sap/<SID>/SUM and started the tool via command (with root😞

./STARTUP confighostagent QHR &

or

./STARTUP <SID> &

When calling the URL http://localhost:1128/lmsl/sumabap/QHR/doc/sluigui the authentication box appears where we type in the sidadm credentials. When we confirm the credentials the box appears again after 1 second. No matter if the credentials are correct (sidadm with correct password) or not (any login with any password), the authentication box appears again (see attached screenshot).

This is, what we already checked:

1. Restart of the SUM
2. Restart of SAP Host Agent
3. Installation of latest SAP Host Agent version
4. Restart of complete virtual machine
5. Tried Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome in normal mode and in private browsing mode
6. Re-download / re-extract of SUM to /usr/sap/<SID>/SUM
7. Check of file authorizations of SUM

Notes we checked:

• 927637 - Web service authentication in sapstartsrv as of Release 7.00
• 1563660 - sapcontrol, user authorization issues (SUM)
• 2284028 - SUM SL Common UI : Troubleshooting problems with the new SUM UI
• 2426160 - DB6: Add. Info - Software Update Manager 1.0 SP20

We changed the saphostctrl tracelevel to 3 and found an error in the /usr/sap/hostctrl/work/sapstartsrv.log after trying to authenticate again:

[Thr 140134583793408] Authenticate check on cache failed

Tue Jul 11 17:21:34 2017

pam_authenticate_user -> service( sapstartsrv ) user (
qhradm )

*** ERROR => pam_authenticate ( qhradm ) failed :
Authentication failure  [usercheckux. 243]

[Thr 140134583793408] helper exit with return code 251

Tue Jul 11 17:21:34 2017

pam_authenticate_user -> service( login ) user ( qhradm )

Tue Jul 11 17:21:36 2017

*** ERROR => pam_authenticate ( qhradm ) failed :
Authentication failure  [usercheckux. 243]

[Thr 140134583793408] Tue Jul 11 17:21:36 2017

[Thr 140134583793408] helper exit with return code 251

[Thr 140134583793408] *** ERROR => soap_check_permission
authentication: ( qhradm, ExecutOperation ) FAILED [DefaultOpera 163]

[Thr 140134583793408] Authenticate clear cache

[Thr 140134583793408] Unauthorized (user authentication
required)

[Thr 140134583793408] *** ERROR => Authentication is
required  [HTTPProxyHan 258]

[Thr 140134583793408] HTTPResponse::SendError HTTP 401:
'Unauthorized: User authentication required' send as 'Unauthorized'

SAP note 927637 says the following:

[…]

If the user/password check fails, the system generates an "Invalid Credentials" SOAP exception.

[…]

Unfortunately there are no hints what to do with the above error message.

Do you have any idea, what we can do to find/solve the problem?

[tenbussa · Accepted solution]

After getting a hint of a colleague we checked the fstab and the options for the mounted file systems. All directories were mounted with the option "nosuid", which prevented the SUM from starting with the user "sidadm". After re-mounting the directories without the nosuid option we were able to authenticate with the user "sidadm" in the SUM.