vSphere HTML5 logs out immediately after logging in

[vitaprimo]

The last modifications I made were the installation of vSphere Integrated Containers extensions, however, I decided to scratch that so I got rid of both of the extensions, for a minute after deleting the extension the HTML5 client worked again, then SSHed into the appliance to modify the timeout settings I had modified minutes before when I was looking for the cause of the problems, restarted the service and it is working again. The Flex client works fine, only the HTML5 client kicks me out. All of the ESXi hosts and vCenter are blocked from accessing the internet so I doubt it's security-related and since the VIC extensions are both gone now that's out too; what did I do to screw up my vCenter Appliance?

I do have a backup from right before I started messing around with it but I'd like to try to rescue it first. I just discovered there's a "Fling" HTML5 client and from the little I've read so far, it's some kind of beta deployed in another machine and not in vCenter directly, I guess I could try that as well. Any ideas??

[daphnissov]

Try to login to the HTML5 client from an incognito tab. Does it behave similarly?

[vitaprimo]

Just did,

Didn't work. I tried five browsers, two OSes, with the built-in PSC accounts, with my usual AD admin account that has the exact same permissions as the default PSC admin account, and with the Active Directory account using smart card authentication, it makes no difference, it successfully logs in; the interface starts to load, the top grey bar appears as well as some elements more under that, then it apparently loads more elements then it's like "just kidding, I didn't want to sign in, just peeking" because I can see the address in the browser change and in one of the quickly changing addresses it reads "logout" sandwiched in the URL.

I've noticed that if in another tab in the same browser I'm logged in using the Flex client, it doesn't log me out from there, it keeps working. I hadn't tried logging out before in a tab so I don't know if this is expected behaviour, but sessions are per-browser, not per tab, right? When I've signed in once already using smart card auth it even asks me to close the browser to use the same method again.

Thanks for your help, BTW.

[daphnissov]

No, the SAML token you acquire is valid across all browser sessions since it's in the same "plane" of authorizations regardless of client. What version of 6.5 is this?

[vitaprimo]

I updated the appliance and that fixed the HTML5 client working again so I though about making a backup now that everything seems OK it and girlfriend kicked me out and threw my stuff right outside in the form of error:

[object Object]

Much like my rambling, it doesn't even make sense.    It then kicked a few times just as I clicked the Backup button and once without even clicking it, the appliance had been working for plenty enough to settle down so I'm sure it didn't kick me out because it was starting up.

Anyway, I'm restarting it, letting it run for a while so it settles and try again, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to redeploy. Thanks for your assistance.

[daphnissov]

And so what version is this now?

[daphnissov]

I guess it doesn't matter too much. I'm thinking something in the config profile got hosed at some point. It sounds like you want to redeploy anyhow, but if you don't (or even if you do), I'd definitely install the stand-alone HTML5 client Fling in your environment. It can co-exist with the vCSA and it makes no changes to the appliance. You connect it to your vCenter and then connect to the fling as your H5 client source. The benefit here is they are on an almost weekly release cadence and so you get new features very quickly.