Mobile 2011 R1 - Blackberry 9330 6.0 (latest firmware) "The request was aborted" on Login. [ Edited ]

[cmorton]

Hi All,

 looking to see if anyone has a suggestion for this error we are seeing on a blackberry 9330 6.0 "The request was aborted." when authenticating...we can authenticate through chrome or firefox on a windows machine, but no luck on the blackberry.

Thanks for any input.

[jhershauer]

Hi Chad,

Are you SData and SlxMobile IIS sites on the same server, or are you trying to run them on separate servers using CORS? The BB Browser has an issue with CORS, so you'll need to make sure you're running it all off of the same server.

Thanks,

Jeff

[greensweater]

We are having the same problem. A concurrent issue is the BB browser asking for domain credentials. I think this may have something to do with how the BB is authenticated on the domain. I made a test page on the SLXMobile web server with read access for Everyone, restarted IIS, and tried to get there from BB browser. It still asked for domain credentials. After entering creds, I could get both the test page and then the SLXMobile client.

I guess the BB is caching the login page, erroring on the login request, and failing. A workaround may be to make a "jumping off" page with a link to the mobile login page... force it to be non-cached... so the user has to be attached to the domain to get to the SLXMobile login. Just thinking out loud...

Resolution is pending... Here's some info from Blackberry about authentication, if you can make heads or tails of it. I'd love to see some more docs or suggestions from Sage on BES configuration...

[jhershauer]

And this is only on the BlackBerry? You can hit the mobile site from, say, FireFox on your desktop/laptop, and the browser doesn't ask you for credentials?

Thanks,

Jeff

[greensweater]

The mobile site is on the intranet only, so it is not exposed outside of the network. When we hit the site from Firefox on a network machine we do not get a Windows authentication request. I guess that's because the workstation is already logged in on the network. However, Blackberrys (berries?) are not attached to the domain, so I think that's why it's asking for credentials, and I think the "request aborted" is just a failed XHR call.

To clarify, I'm referring to a Windows authentication popup, not the normal SalesLogix login page. 

[greensweater]

Continued weirdness: another BB user had this error, but we weren't getting the Windows credentials popup as explained above. We tried clearing the cache, and hard resetting the BB with no luck. I mailed a link to a different web server on the same domain. When they navigated to the new link, they received the Windows logon popup, and after providing Windows creds they were then able to go back to the SLX web server and log in.

Our BES is set up with MDS and the user operates on the network via a proxy (utility BES domain user). I think the BES is timing out on the proxy, the BB is displaying the login page from cache, and failing when POSTing the credentials.

The issue only occurs on certain BBs, other users don't have this problem. It might be easier to simply wipe the Blackberry and try again.

[greensweater]

After testing on several other BBs it looks like this is a consistent issue. Wiping the BB won't be of any use. 

[greensweater]

It appears that this error was due to incorrect SPN settings. The implementation guide states that you must run the following commands as domain admin, with the last command as a check:

setspn -A http/machinename domain\webdll

setspn -A http/servername.domain.com domain\webdll

setspn -L domain/webdll

Our problem was that we had used the FQDN rather than the fully qualified MACHINE name. When trying to access SData using the domain name, we would receive Windows authentication popups. In the case of the Mobile client, the XHR login request to SData would return a 401.1 unauthorized error, resulting in the "request was aborted" message.

The BES is configured to support HTTP authentication. I could see in the server logs that successful requests were using NTLM authentication -- this is the BES server acting as a proxy to allow the Blackberry onto the domain. However, subsequent requests may use the Negotiate auth module. Without the correct SPN, these requests would fail with 401.1, causing the aborted request messages.

Mobile client relies on SData, so this portal must be working correctly before the Mobile client will work.

[jhershauer]

Thanks for the update! This one was a pain to track down, eh?

Now that we're aware of it, maybe we can update the documentation a little bit to help others verify the correct setup.

Thanks,

Jeff

[greensweater]

Definitely! We are using Windows authentication so there's some extra complexity, but I think in most cases the "Request was aborted" errors result from problems accessing SData.