RoR authentication with IBM Notes/Domino

Rails
1

This is a very simple authentication system for a Ruby on Rails server
in
the same internet domain. It will allow you to get back the username of
the
person hitting your server provided they already have authenticated with
an
IBM Lotus/Domino or Websphere server that uses multi-server based
session
authentication.
IBM Domino/Websphere authentication works by placing an encrypted cookie
for
a given domain. There are a number of ways to find out what this cookie
means.
For instance, you could either:

  1. Decrypt the cookie using the secret key in the domino directory; or
  2. Pass that cookie along to a live domino server and get back the
    username.
    In this example, we are going to use the second option. This means we
    take
    that cookie and then pass it to an IBM server to check the
    authentication.
    The cookie is stored in as LTPA token. Here is the ruby on rails code:

require ‘open-uri’

module DominoAuthenication

public

accesses the current user from the session.

overwrite this to set how the current user is retrieved from the

session.

To store just the whole user model in the session:

def current_user

session[:user]

end

def current_user
if session[:user]
@current_user ||= session[:user]
else
begin
tokenstring = “LtpaToken=”
tokenstring = tokenstring + cookies[:LtpaToken] if cookies[:LtpaToken]
OpenURI.open_uri(‘http://[your domino server here]/[your database]/[some
page that returns the username]’,
“Cookie” => tokenstring) do |http|
@current_user = http.read.strip
end
#rescue
end
end
end
end

On the domino side, you just need to create a database and then a page
within the database that has a field returning @username().
This will then return the full username. If you are using QuickPlace for
instance, you will get back something like
“CN=user/OU=placename/OU=QP/O=certifier” and you can deal with this as
you
like in your ruby code.

2

But how did you put Domino and ROR under the same domain? Can you
describe more your solution?

David

3

As long as you have the RoR on a server in the same domain, e.g.
http://www.projectlounge.com is the domino server, and
http://ror.projectlounge.com is the Ruby on Rails server, then it will
be in
the same domain when you set the authentication to work across the
domain.

You could also have them on the same server, and then just use mod
rewrite
to direct requests based on the URL for instance
http://www.projectlounge.com/dominorails/* will go the RoR server and
the
rest goes to domino.

This is how we are expanding IBM QuickPlace with RoR code and it seems
to
work fairly well. You get the ability to write quick features in RoR
that
you can link into Domino.

I have started to write a DominoRecord type base class that can make it
a
little faster to include Domino models. Email me if you want to help
with
that.

Ian.