jabber GSSAPI SASL problems

A number of Computing Officers in Informatics are now using SL7 for their standard desktop. This is good because it means various bugs are being flushed out of the woodwork. A recent issue we have found is that the pidgin messaging client could not talk to our local jabber server. We have GSSAPI support enabled so that we can have single-sign-on, that all works fine on SL6 but the client would not work at all on SL7. It could talk fine to other jabber servers where simple username/password was used though. The error message we have been seeing is:

SASL error: SASL(-7): invalid parameter supplied: Parameter error in client.c near line 961

There was a lot of head-scratching over this problem, after much investigation by various people we pinned it down to an issue with the cyrus-sasl package in SL7 (2.1.26-17.el7). It seems to be related to Redhat bug #984079 and also bug 3480 in the cyrus bug tracker. The latest version of the package (2.1.26-20) taken from Fedora was built for SL7 and that works perfectly. The differences between the two versions of the package are not huge, it appears that the relevant patch is cyrus-sasl-2.1.26-revert-upstream-080e51c7fa0421eb2f0210d34cf0ac48a228b1e9.patch. I suspect we could just apply this single patch to the SRPM from SL7 but we probably want the other patches anyway so we’ll just run with the rebuilt version from Fedora for now.

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