[Users] webadmin login issues with AD

[Itamar Heim]

On 03/03/2013 15:26, Keith Mitchell wrote:
> On 3/3/13 7:42 AM, Yair Zaslavsky wrote:
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Keith Mitchell" <kamitch at cisco.com>
>>> To: "Yair Zaslavsky" <yzaslavs at redhat.com>
>>> Cc: users at ovirt.org, "Juan Antonio Hernandez Fernandez"
>>> <jhernand at redhat.com>, "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
>>> Sent: Sunday, March 3, 2013 2:28:38 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [Users] webadmin login issues with AD
>>>
>>> On 3/3/13 6:57 AM, Yair Zaslavsky wrote:
>>>> Please elaborate on "quite a few groups" - actually this is a well
>>>> known issue.
>>>> I was afraid you might have permissions on "too many objects" or
>>>> that the account is a member of too many groups.
>>>> However, being a member of too many groups should have caused the
>>>> search to be slow/hang as well.
>>> I don't have an exact count, but I think its along the order of
>>> magnitude of 300-400.
>> Hi,
>> I gave an incorrect explanation before (I thought about it and
>> understood where my error lies ).
>> If I add a user using engine-manage-domains and do not provide
>> -addPermissions, I will still be able to login to the system using
>> admin at internal, and perform search for users & groups.
>> This means I do not need to have permissions for the user I added for
>> that domain to perform search so the "permissions" check is of course
>> not performed at search!
>>
>> The number of groups is important in login - oVirt will try to
>> calculate all the permissions of the users, and this is based on the
>> permission the user have directly on an object, or that its group has.
>> If the user is a member of 300 groups, oVirt tries to get information
>> for all that groups.
>> THis is why login hands, but search does not hang.
> I guess I don't understand why ovirt needs to do that.  You should be
> able to get the list of groups a user is a member which I thought was
> sufficient for most apps to determine authorization.
>
> I know we use AD authentication for a lot of things and i've never hit
> this before.
>
> Changing the AD config isn't something I can do so it sounds like there
> is no workaround and i'll just have to live with the local
> authentication.  Or pehaps I can stick some ldap server in front of AD that
>

actually the issue is not getting the list of groups, rather than ovirt 
is is checking which other groups these groups are part of, to make sure 
user gets the right permissions from nested groups as well. we didn't 
find an easy way to do this which doesn't involve looping on all the groups.
is this common for most users in your AD to have 300-400 groups?

Thanks,
    Itamar