Environment
GroupWise Mobility Service 18
SuSE Enterprise Server 12
Situation
When using LDAP authentication in GroupWise Mobility Service 18,
that authentication fails if there are extended ascii characters in
the password.
The line you will see in the mobility-agent.log is this:
2018-09-28 15:35:26.501 ERROR [Device_Thread-32]
[DeviceInterface:1942] [userID:] [eventID:] [objectID:] [Server]
LDAP Authentication Exception: 'ascii' codec can't encode character
u'\xe4' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
Resolution
There is not a resolution for this issue however there are several
workarounds.
1. Use GroupWise authentication
2. Do not use extended ascii characters in the
passwords
3. Upgrade to SLES15 using this upgrade documentation. The server must
be at SLES12SP3 or later and the offline upgrade must be used for
this to succeed.
Cause
Unfortunately this is a SLES12 defect. On SLES11 the module
is python-ldap, on SLES12 the module is python-pyldap, and on
SLES15 module is python2-ldap. The module on SLES12 is no
longer supported by engineering and will not be updated.