At a loss over Active Directory Namespace verification

[TonyF]

Hi all:

I recently inherited the Cognos installations at my company and I seemed to have a bit of a hang of it until I went on vacation.  All of a sudden one installations refused to acknowledge the AD Namespace. 

We are running version 8.3.  If I go inside of the Cognos Configuration piece, my AD authentication namespace tests fine, but when I enter into Cognos through the web, I get an error stating, "The Cognos gateway is unable to connect to the Cognos BI server. The server may be unavailable or the gateway may not be correctly configured. "  when ever I attempt to log on.  Yet if I enable anonymous logon, I am able to move around at will.

If I navigate to Cognos Administration, Users, Groups, and Roles, I can see the AD namespace, but I cannot enter it to see the names of all of the people in Active Directory

I can copy the settings out of each line on the gateway and dispatcher (we have a two node setup) and each link works fine in the browser as I thought that these may have become messed up by the mystery user, but they seem fine as well.

This was all working when I went out and had been working well since the middle of last year.

I gave Cognos a call after trying everything I could from their support knowledge base and still no luck as they are stumped.

Has anyone else ever run across anything like this?

Thanks in advance

[SomeClown]

Yet if I enable anonymous logon, I am able to move around at will.

If I navigate to Cognos Administration, Users, Groups, and Roles, I can see the AD namespace, but I cannot enter it to see the names of all of the people in Active Directory

Enable anonymous - you mean in Cognos Configuration?  Then yes, once that is enabled, you don't authenticate and by default, would not be able to browse into AD - I think that's a false trail.

What is the dispatcher URI on the gateway machine pointing to?  If you have a separate gateway, did they stick a proxy or firewall between them?  Run a tracert on the gateway box to the dispatcher and look for funny (different) ip ranges in the call stack.

It isn't AD - something is stripping credentials or blocking traffic from the gateway

[smiley]

I gave Cognos a call after trying everything I could from their support knowledge base and still no luck as they are stumped.

Has an AAA trace been performed and analysed by support?

[TonyF]

I meant to come back on and tell everyone what it was to the best of my ability.  Turns out my crypto keys got out of whack so there was no valid communication between my web server and my application server.  Once they walked me through steps (which they said I could find on the site) to my them regenerate, everything worked ok.

It was weird because the URLS in the configuration applet worked when I placed them in a browser, but for some reason would not work when called from within Cognos.