AHD04009: Login failed for userid; user must be externally authenticated

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

This article is meant to provide guidance for how to handle external authentication failures as indicated by the error message in the Title of this article

When trying to authenticate the following error may be encountered in stdlog:

AHD04009: Login failed for userid; user must be externally authenticated.

In some scenarios authentication is successful, in other scenarios the above error is generated

Environment

All Versions of Service Desk Manager

Authentication configured to utilize an alternative authority like LDAP

Some environments may have load balancers like F5

Resolution

When looking at this type of issue, it is best to first confirm what is authenticating the users and how are they authenticating users.

 

Is LDAP involved?

Check if LDAP or some other external source such as IIS or Single Sign On is configured in the environment

How is this authority authenticating? The authority could use passwords or certificates or something else

Check with the authority to see if the authentication is failing there

 

Is there a load balancer involved?

Have the user confirm if anything in the environment like a load balancer or a firewall is affecting the traffic

 

Test authentication directly on the SDM server using its own hostname instead of any DNS names to minimize the effects of any other configurations in the environment.

If authentication succeeds directly on the server, then that indicates that the root cause is somewhere external to the server.