As an Instance Administrator, I want to have log info with better context that helps locate and resolve issue more quickly

• Type: Story
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: None
• Fix Version/s: None
• Component/s: Application Security > LDAP
• Labels:
  • beyond_7.4
  • beyond_7.4-could
• Epic Link: LDAP - better troubleshooting

Motivation

Under the condition that portal experiences intermittent LDAP server socket connection timeout while importing users and groups, certain users will fail to be imported as a result of NullPointerException, because Null value for LDAPContext is returned when LDAP connection is initialized.

Only under the condition that we set log level for PortalLDAPUtil as Debug, we can see the SocketTimeoutException leads to the failure of binding LDAP server.

The following error message was see without any context:

[liferay/scheduler_dispatch-2][PortalLDAPUtil:?]  Failed to bind to the LDAP server

Areas to improve

• Improve the logging by adding more context to warning message "Failed to bind to the LDAP server", to help diagnose issue in the future.
• Wrap the exception and propagate source exception from PortalLDAPUtil to caller.
• The NPE stack trace stems from method getNameInNamespace in class PortalLDAPUtil at line 434.

  package com.liferay.portal.security.ldap;
  
  	public static String getNameInNamespace(
  			long ldapServerId, long companyId, Binding binding)
  		throws Exception {
  ...
          // line 434
  		String name = binding.getName();
  ...
  	}
  

  we can see there is no NULL check for parameter variable "binding" before the call "binding.getName()", so a NULL value check before line 434 with a suitable log message may be very helpful.