local login issue: cycles back to homepage

usegalaxy.org support
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#1

Hi,

I’m the administrator for a local Galaxy instance for a few users on a dedicated server in my lab [v19.05, Apache proxy, Linux Debian 10]

For some time now, we’ve run into an annoying and mystifying issue :
when anyone (myself included) tries to login, the site cycles back to the welcome page, without taking authentication into account

However, it remains possible to:

  • have a wrong user/password combination rejected
  • reset a user’s password
  • register a new user

Besides, AFAIK, nothing has changed on the server ! (Issue started before recent Debian upgrade from 10.2 to 10.4)

And I cannot find any relevant error in the logs (Galaxy, Apache or PostgreSQL) :exploding_head:

Any suggestion/possible test would be appreciated…

Thanks in advance

PS : Of course, no amount of service restart(s), or even server reboot, helped

#2

Think this is a known thing of version 19.05 after logging try to refresh the page (think this was the solution, can’t remember it so well).

#3

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion (and sorry about the delay).

Unfortunately, URLs look OK and refreshing does not change anything.

In the meantime, I upgraded our Galaxy instance to release_20.01. Still impossible to login (!)

That’s getting… frustrating

#4

OK, some follow-up…

After somme digging using Firefox developer tools, I noticed that, when redirected to the home page from the login form, there was an additional warning at the head of the web console, about the « galaxysession » cookie… (pointing to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie/SameSite)

From there, view-source:https://(…)/galaxy/user/login yields
{"err_msg": "No session token set, denying request."}

Since the issue was present on all the recent browser I tried (Firefox, Safari and Edge), on a hunch, I tried with an older one, namely Firefox ESR

And this time I was able to log to Galaxy at last! :partying_face:

So there might be something wrong with session cookie handling in Galaxy…

Should I file a bug report?

#6

OK, final update :

The issue was eventually resolved when I was able to use “proper” SSL certificates for Apache (i.e. instead of self-signed ones), that were supplied by my University’s IT department.

No more login issues, including with the latest browser versions :sunglasses:

Hope this might help someone else…

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