Arch Linux

marmoser

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2015-12-02

Posts: 13

Website

Evolution keeps asking for password ( affects ews account only )

For about two weeks, evolution keeps asking every few minutes for the password. This only affects the exchange account ( evolution-ews ), other email accounts ( imap, pop ) work fine.

Right after starting evolution I get about 10 times a password dialog, each of them prefilled with username and password. If I confirm all of them, evolution will not ask for a couple of minutes, then it starts all over again.

Needless to say, this is highly annoying. I've tried installing seahorse and mess around there, resetting the passwords, rm the local password cache, nothing really seems to help. There are people reporting similar things out there, but not exactly the same.

Anybody here struggling with the same thing?
What would be a good starting point for debugging evolution and gnome-keyring?

currently I have:
extra/evolution 3.24.3-1 (gnome-extra)
extra/gnome-keyring 1:3.20.0+57+g9db67ef6-1 (gnome)
extra/evolution-ews 3.24.3-1

downgrading is not an option, since it breaks dependencies

I'm not using gnome, my .xinitrc contains as the arch wiki suggests:
eval $(/usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --start --components=pkcs11,secrets,ssh)
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK
exec awesome

Anybody having the same issue?

Last edited by marmoser (2017-06-30 09:33:22)

marmoser

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2015-12-02

Posts: 13

Website

Re: Evolution keeps asking for password ( affects ews account only )

I still keep having this issue. Nevertheless, I managed to decrease the number of popups asking for passwords by deselecting address books, calendars, task lists and memo lists in the account settings ( I use none of them ).

kragol

Member

Registered: 2016-03-24

Posts: 11

Re: Evolution keeps asking for password ( affects ews account only )

I have been facing a similar issue since mid-june 2017 too. Except for me I have not been able to connect to the exchange server at all, as if my password was incorrect. Since it happened at the same time for my personal computer (running Arch) and my work laptop (running an outdated evolution version on Ubuntu 14.04) I thought it was due to a change in the server's configuration (over which I have zero control and cannot even get information about from the IT services who do not care much about linux users).

I am trying again now hoping that some update of evolution (or the server's configuration) might enable a solution but I am struggling. Have you by any chance figured out a solution to your problem?

I have been studying the logs of evolution-ews (using the environment variable EWS_DEBUG=2), but I cannot see where it goes wrong. I disabled gnome-keyring to limit the investigation field but it does not seem to change anything. It seems that the exchange server responds normally at first. It provides me with both an "exchangecookie" and some NTLM key, after which evolution-ews responds using the same cookie and another NTLM key (which I assume is matched to the server's key) and shows me a password prompt. But then, after typing my password, I don't see any message sending the password (which might have been omitted from the log for security reasons) and it looks like the dialogue with the server goes back to square one: same negotiation to get an NTLM key and an exchangecookie while I get another password prompt in evolution. Basically, everything looks as if my password was wrong. The same happens both on my personal computer and my work laptop (except on the laptop evolution 3.10 does not include the exchangecookie in its response).

Also, at the same time evolution-ews stopped working (roughly mid-june 2017), the autodiscover service to get the OAB URL in the account configuration stopped working, again asking me for a password and treating me as if my password was wrong.

I am fairly confident that there should be a solution because I can use davmail to get access to the exchange server and it looks like davmail uses a similar mechanism to get access (according to davmail's "wire" logs). With davmail, as soon as I respond to the server with the NTLM key and exchangecookie, the authentication is done (I get an "HTTP/1.1 200 OK" response) and davmail can start doing business. Still, I would much rather use evolution-ews because davmail is very sluggish in comparison.

marmoser

Member

From: Vienna, Austria

Registered: 2015-12-02

Posts: 13

Website

Re: Evolution keeps asking for password ( affects ews account only )

For me, setting the authentication type from basic to NTLM solved the popup issue. A very flawed solution, since NTLM auth is blocked by the server for requests from outside the intranet which means I still get the popups at home if I don't have a VPN tunnel. Kerberos authentication is the third option (besides basic and NTLM), but it always failed for me due to some misconfigurations and I never investigated this thoroughly.