Well I don't know why it took me so long to notice this. We use Shibboleth to provide authN for our VCL web interfaces, and during debugging we sometimes switch it off to make it easier to get at the local admin account. I've just realized that this has been contributing to our block allocation problems. When Shib is disabled, bock allocations are working. But when it's switched back on, the vclsystem account is intercepted by Apache's Shib module and never has a chance to talk to the real web interface.
I figure this must have come up elsewhere; how are other sites working around this issue? We have a project on our timeline to put in a back door for admin access to VCL, bypassing Shib, but we haven't started work on it yet and I don't know if the XML/RPC interface will pose its own issues separate from what we'll need to deal with for browser access. Thanks as always, --Michael -- Michael Jinks :: [email protected] University of Chicago IT Services
