Web Agent Guides › Web Agent Configuration Guide › Manage Password Services › Supported Approaches for Using Password Services with Web Agents

Supported Approaches for Using Password Services with Web Agents

To support password services, you can use either of the following approaches:

• FCC-based approach (required for POST preservation)
• CGI-based approach (deprecated)

Note: POST preservation is not supported with CGI and Perl based Password Services, ACE authentication, or any custom authentication scheme that posts to an FCC.

We recommend the FCC-based approach. CGI-based password services is deprecated, which means it will not be supported at a future release.

FCC Password Services and URL Query Encryption

The FCC Password Services application enables query data on the URL to be encrypted, further securing Agent interactions. You can only encrypt query data with FCC Password Services. FCC Password Services files include:

• smpwservices.fcc

  This FCC is installed with the Web Agent and is located at:

  web_agent_home/samples/forms

  If Password Services is invoked and there is no password policy configured, the SiteMinder Administrator at the Policy Server should set the environment variable NETE_PWSERVICES_REDIRECT to a relative path for smpwservices.fcc.

  The path is:

  /siteminderagent/forms/smpwservices.fcc

  The new FCC displays the Password Services form based on the FCC directives authreason and username.

• smpwservices.unauth

  This file handles errors that occur during GET/POST actions of the Password Services forms.

  This file is similar to other FCC unauthorized files that are invoked if there is a failure processing the request during the POST. This FCC handles error conditions, such as an empty TARGET variable. The error reporting is intended to be synchronized with the CGI-based Password Services and for handling any other unknown errors caused by an FCC POST.

• smpwservicesUS-EN.properties

  This properties file is used by smpwservices.fcc to display the user-friendly messages on the Password Services forms.

  This properties file has the user-friendly messages, which an administrator can modify depending on what he wants to display on the Password Services forms. The format for the message is name=value.