Question

I am trying to figure out how to sync authlogic persistence tokens across servers.

I have 4 servers, and I have many apps on all 4, the authentication is working across all the apps on one server. I can even get them to work on different servers if I copy the persistence token from one to the other 3.

The only issue I can think of is users may login to one server and not the other, but I still want them to be able to be synced in case they do go to that other server. For example:

Joe logs into server 1

Joe also logs into server 2

Jane only logs into server 1

Fred only logs into server 2

I would need a 2 way sync from each of the servers. I don’t care which persistence token they get as long as they are all the same.

This also uses LDAP for authentication in case that matters.

I am open to pretty much any suggestion, including something non-rails related.

Edit

To update this, I cannot remove LDAP authentication. I really have no desire to replace authlogic. I was thinking of something like a rake task or shell script to handle the syncing.

I am perfectly fine coming up with my own idea, just want to see if someone knows the best way.

Thank you all for any help.

Answer 1

You might really be looking for a central authentication service (CAS) — something that will enable Single Sign On (SSO).

This enables you to log on to different services. It will work something like

• User requests http://server1
• server1 checks if the user is authenticated against the local store. If not:
• server1 redirects user to something like http://casserver?return=server1
• casserver actually gets the username/password or credentials, authenticates them, and:
• casserver redirects to http://server1

Then:

• User requests http://server2
• server2 redirects user to http://casserver?return=server2
• casserver redirects user to http://server2 with the authtoken

That way the user does not enter credentials more than once.

OAuth works like this (over-simplified)

People have used the java based CAS . Some posts:

• http://weblog.plexobject.com/?p=1682
• http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2007/01/08/cas-sso-and-rails.html