894860 - Persona Aliases have trouble staying logged in on Webmaker.org

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: webmaker.org, defect)

Description

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

* I didn't notice this before the "We've made Persona better for Mozilla Foundation!" changes.
* I am filing to Webmaker b/c I tried two different methods, and it seems like the problem is on our side. I'm, of course, not entirely sure.

Here's my use case: I have a personal Persona account that I use for Bugzilla and other sites.

With the relaunch of webmaker.org, our team has set up a Persona account that is linked to an alias ([e-mail]).

If I am trying to do something on Webmaker.org and am logged in as Mozteach while at the same time I'm trying to file bugs on Bugzilla or am otherwise logged in with my personal Persona – the mozteach alias on webmaker crashes and burns. If you manage (after two hours) to get logged in, you get kicked out as soon as you hit publish or navigate at all.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but no amount of cursing, clearing caches or deleting cookies can help this alias log into Webmaker. I even tried logging in via different browsers and couldn't (which I don't understand).

I just tried the reverse - I logged into Bugzilla with mozteach and Webmaker with "Laura" – IT WORKED FINE. I wasn't kicked out of webmaker, I could navigate, publish, etc.

If I need to do something on webmaker.org, I have to log out of any other Persona associated logins, including Bugzilla. Gigantic PIA.

I imagine that other users have the need for dual identities being logged in on different tabs as well. I'm not sure why the reverse would work, but there's something funny with Persona Aliases and Webmaker.org

Comment 1

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

I've noticed odd issues too, I'll follow up with the identity team

Comment 3

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

This appears to be a weird interaction with silent cert reprovisioning (5 minutes after login) and our SSO solution.

Comment 4

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

Attachment: screenshots from Persona issue

@JBuck: From the field (in case another description helps at all):

We are getting some strange errors on webmaker here. 

The first one shows that there is a "Sign off" showing up for Zac when he is logged in as himself in Persona but no profile picture or even a "Publish" button. The second shows what he sees when he logs out, ie. his persona email (which is right), NWP's persona email (which is also right since he's been using that too from time to time here), and then another email owned by Chris McKay, another teacher who is also using the NWP account but otherwise has no real relation to Zac at all. 

This is also strange because I am a third person using the NWP account from time to time here and my email doesn't show up here like Chris McKay's. So we are puzzled why Chris's shows up at all. So just fyi about that too in case it matters.

Just fyi that Zac is having these issues across browsers and also he is signing in/signing out and it's not making a difference.

Any thoughts about what kind of conflict might be happening here? And/or something else he could try to refresh the Publish button? Clearly that's the most critical element.

Comment 5

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

Attachment: multiple emails that shouldn't be associated w/ the same Persona

Comment 7

[Matt Thompson (@OpenMatt :OpenMatt)]

* I experience the same issue: when using Thimble for extended periods of time, I found I had to keep logging back into Persona multiple times

* Jbuck: is this is a known issue that is being worked on in another ticket, let's mark this one as such or "Resolved wontfix?"

Comment 8

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

I'm going to be working with the Identity team over the next two weeks to add native SSO to Persona which will simplify a lot of code we need to provide SSO.

I also find this very annoying, so I will be doing my best to fix this quickly :)

Comment 9

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

quick note to say this came up in yesterday's mentor community call :)

Comment 10

[Laura Hilliger [:epilepticrabbit]]

(not that I'm being pushy, just thought you'd want to know!)

Comment 11

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

Word on the street is that Persona SSO is dead. what's the plan of action here, and for dependents on this bug?

Comment 12

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

I don't know yet. I think there are some intermediate steps we can take, like removing the auto login/logout functionality once the Goldilocks API lands. We'll need to do some more research on this...

Comment 14

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

I'm going to close this bug in favour of bug 935051 which has some steps we can take to move forward. The original problem of getting logged out after 5 minutes of using a mozillafoundation.org or mozilla.org email address has seemed to go away, so I think this bug is good now.