WinSCP server prompt

I have recently started using WinSCP to do ssh file transfers from a windows server.

I found it very annoying that I would need to press ok to a 'server prompt' dialog for each transfer when I dragged over a bunch of files to the destination server.

What I realized is that the server prompt will always be displayed for every new transfer which is initiated while any of the pending transfers is not complete.

To say it in other words, first do a complete transfer for one file. You will have to say ok to a server prompt for that. Subsequent transfers will not bring up the server prompt.

Showing CAS username in ZK

After authenticating, CAS saves the username in a session variable as documented on the jasig site.

ZK has good offline documentation on how implicit objects session and sessionScope can be used but I needed to access Sun's Java EE tutorial's unified EL page because of my rusty EL.

Here's how I did it in a ZK label.

<label value="Welcome ${sessionScope['edu.yale.its.tp.cas.client.filter.user']}"/>

Setting up CAS Java client

I started my journey by creating a new web project in eclipse and configured the web xml according to the CAS Java Client procedure. I basically pointed to an apache2 load balancer for a tomcat cluster where the CAS deployment was running.

I immediately ran into problems with the following error:

sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

This error occured because the certificate being referenced was not in my JRE's keystore. I was able to resolve following the procedure at dreamingthings blog.

I was not thru yet. I then got this error:

javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: java.security.cert.CertificateException: No subject alternative names present

This error arose since I was using the IP address of the server in the CAS authentication URL. While I had used the IP for the Common Name (CN) entry while generating the certificate, this sun forum answer by user ejp discourages that.

I finally regenerated the self signed certificate, making sure that I used the hostname for the CN entry. There were no more errors after that :)

My next post should be on getting ZK to show the CAS username saved in the session.