834784 - Constant 401 from Google regardless of username/password

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Calendar :: Provider: CalDAV, defect)

Description

[iwasinnamuknow]

Attachment: caldav-log.txt

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
Build ID: 20130116073211

Steps to reproduce:

Added a new CalDav account (in the form of https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/<email>/events) on a fresh machine, following the same process as previous successful deployments. Navigating to the above url in a browser results in a request for user/password then takes me to the ICS file.

I noticed the 401 error in the attached logs while writing the above, I have tried clearing all saved passwords from thunderbird which forced it to ask me again. I supplied the correct user/password as with the browser test but it still gives the 401.

See attached verbose logs.


Actual results:

It worked for around 2 months flawlessly but a week ago it failed with no messages. The calendar is turned off, any attempt to turn it on gives absolutely no feedback except a handful of entries in the error log which don't seem to be discussed previously.


Expected results:

Events should have been populated from Google, the calendar instead remains blank.

Comment 1

[iwasinnamuknow]

I have just been notified that this is happening on a second machine at the same site. A 401 is returned regardless of username/password yet in the browser it works without issue.

Comment 2

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

Based on some other posts that I saw it might be possible that you need to use an application-specific password: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185833

Comment 3

[iwasinnamuknow]

Thanks but I've just checked the relevant gmail accounts and neither of them have any application specific passwords. Also the users claim that they haven't made any direct changes to the gmail accounts since they were setup.

Comment 4

[Matthew Mecca [:mmecca]]

Sometime in the last few days, the authentication realm that Google uses for my CalDAV calendars changed from "Google CalDAV" to "Google APIs", which invalidated all of the stored passwords for those calendars, but I was able to get them working again by removing the previously stored passwords.

(In reply to iwasinnamuknow from comment #0)
> I noticed the 401 error in the attached logs while writing the above, I have
> tried clearing all saved passwords from thunderbird which forced it to ask
> me again. I supplied the correct user/password as with the browser test but
> it still gives the 401.

Did you restart TB after clearing the stored passwords?

Also, I may be remembering incorrectly here, but I thought that in the past the username supplied had to include the "@gmail.com" part, but now it seems to work either way for me. It might be worth trying it both ways to see if it makes any difference in your case.

Comment 5

[iwasinnamuknow]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I had previously tried clearing the passwords and restarting, then re-entering the full email/password when prompted. This didn't work (even with a totally new gmail account/calendar added that works elsewhere, no login prompts at all).

After your note above I tried entering the email prefix and the password, which caused a password prompt to be repeated (for the full email address incidentally) but on entering the password for that it seems to be working properly.

Thanks for your point as it has found a workaround for now, not sure if this is a bug or not but the authentication to google does seem to be very...lets call it unintuitive.

Comment 6

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

We had no similar reports regarding Google CalDAV login, and Google changed its authentication mechanism in September 2013 (see https://blog.mozilla.org/calendar/2013/09/google-is-changing-the-location-url-of-their-caldav-calendars/).

I will resolve this bug report as WORKSFORME. Please, feel free to file a new bug report if you see a similar problem with a recent version of Lightning.