FileSender Documentation

FileSender is an open source web based application that allows authenticated users to securely and easily send arbitrarily large files to other users.
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Frequently Asked Questions for version 2.0

No session after logging in via SimpleSAMLphp

Problem: after logging on a user is simply redirected to the logon page. Logging of SimpleSAMLphp seems to indicate the user is not logged on, no authenticated session is created.

Solution: if you are using SimpleSAMLphp … ticket #1198, config directive …

FileSender 2.0 explicitly sets the session.cookie.path to the site URL on initialisation. Usually this points to / and won’t cause any issues for the standard setup with simplesamlphp where simplesamlphp is in a separate URL space from FileSender.

However, on my testing machine and for example for launching our filesender.uninett.no/beta service this is a bit different and hence sessions between simplesamlphp and filesender are not accepted by filesender. With Shibboleth this is not an issue as it uses its own session variable handling. SimpleSAMLphp is in php and shares with PHP.

Agreed solution: introduce a configuration parameter session_cookie_path. When using SimpleSAMLphp in a URL path other than /, you need to configure this to for example /.

SimpleSAMLphp for local users for small scale setup or testing

If you have a real authentication setup then skip this section.

Some smaller installations do not have access to a SAML server and might like to authenticate without setting one up. To have some static users and passwords to test things out with you can use the below commands.

cd /opt/filesender/simplesaml
touch ./modules/exampleauth/enable

and then setup some users and passwords by editing config/authsources.php. In the below a user ‘tester’ can login and testdriver can login.

// userpass	
'example-userpass' => array(
      'exampleauth:UserPass',
      'tester:testerpassword' => array(
            'uid' => array('tester'),
            'email' => array('tester@localhost.localdomain'),
            'eduPersonTargetedID' => array('uid'),
            'eduPersonAffiliation' => array('member', 'student'),
      ),
      'testdriver:testdriver' => array(
            'uid' => array('testdriver'),
            'email' => array('testdriver@localhost.localdomain'),
            'eduPersonTargetedID' => array('uid'),
            'eduPersonAffiliation' => array('member', 'student'),
      ),
      'employee:employeepass' => array(
            'uid' => array('employee'),
            'eduPersonAffiliation' => array('member', 'employee'),
      ),
),

You will also have to edit your config/config.php file in your FileSender installation to include the below configuration directives.

$config['auth_sp_saml_authentication_source'] ="example-userpass";
$config['auth_sp_saml_email_attribute'] = 'email';

If you have tested things and want to provide access to more than a few users you might like to consider more real world authentication with simplesamlphp including LDAP, Windows Live, or SQL stanza to move authentication over to something more useful or perhaps using social network authentication such as using google, twitter, or facebook.

Troubleshooting:

FileSize inconsistency:

  • check filesize on server and compare to filesize on client!