ejabberd - Comments for "Problems registering users"

You are right: extauth doesn't implement account creation

mfoss — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:05:26 +0000

jtschaff wrote:

registration while using external authentication isn't supported

Ah, you are right. The code shows that extauth doesn't allow to register accounts. The development documentation of extauth doesn't include registration among the allowed operations:

http://svn.process-one.net/ejabberd/trunk/doc/dev.html#htoc9

operation are as follows:
    * auth:User:Server:Password (check if a username/password pair is correct)
    * isuser:User:Server (check if it’s a valid user)
    * setpass:User:Server:Password (set user’s password) 

Checking the ejabberd source code, account registration is allowed when using internal or odbc authentication. Account registration is not allowed when using anonymous, external, ldap or pam. I'll make ure this is explained in the ejabberd Guide in the next ejabberd version.

So, it is expected that you give to your users another mechanism so they create accounts in your external system (a web formulary to your external database, or ...).

think I found it...

jtschaff — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:29:13 +0000

Hi badlop - Thanks for the quick reply. I was actually about to update this ticket - since I posted originally, I downloaded the source and it appears the problem isn't my script but that registration while using external authentication isn't supported. I don't know Erlang beyond reading the tutorial today, but when using {auth_method, external} the registration ends seems to end at ejabberd_auth_external:try_register, which just says no:

try_register(_User, _Server, _Password) ->
    {error, not_allowed}.

I changed ejabberd.cfg to use internal auth, registered with ejabberdctl (finally!), shutdown the server, switched back to external auth through my script, restarted, and authentication of the newly-created account seems to work fine.

Does this explanation make sense or am I misunderstanding something?

Thanks again.

Some tests

mfoss — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:05:00 +0000

If you setup internal auth, registering accounts should work.

If you setup extauth to the example auth script, written in Perl, it should work. You will need to make the script executable for the system user, etc.

And then, if you wrote a script that works correctly, it should work.

If your script doesn't work correctly, maybe you find another script in the the Contributions page written in the same language than yours, and you can use it as example.