Whilst working with a customer getting their Data Finder up and running, licensing and support came across a peculiar error message. After doing some research and experimentation and consulting with Grid Tools engineering, I was able to help them get to the bottom of it and wanted to share it with the community.
The error message dialog that pops up is titled 'Invalid Admin Group'. It contains the text 'Admin group "[group name]" not found in AD. Please call support'. It also has the Data Finder version in the lower right corner.
The root cause was a comma in the company name field when generating a license key. A comma in the company name is the under the covers way that Data Finder distinguishes between internal authentication and Active Directory authentication. Here is the license candidate screen. I've obfuscated local user information.
If I were to append ",MY_DOMAIN" onto the license candidate and send it off, the license I got back would now look for my domain username and password for access to Data Finder. It would also mean that I could not log in as "Administrator" anymore unless I knew the domain administrator password. So, it is important to make sure that at least one local user has the Data Finder Administrator role.
Given the above background, here are some potential issues that could arise from AD usage.
- The user enters a comma as part of the company name field. i.e. Grid Tools, Inc. This would cause a license to generate with a domain of " Inc." which likely does not exist.
- The user intentionally applies an AD based license without having a local user defined as a Data Finder Administrator.
In the case of accidental AD usage, the license needs to be removed from the repository database. This can be done using a SQL tool compatible with your database such as Toad. Connect with the same credentials used in the Data Finder repository connection. From a query window, enter the following:
truncate table gtrep_licence;
commit;
delete from gtrep_clob where clob_id < 0;
commit;
The delete command should remove 3 rows. Once this is done, the user should be able to restart Data Finder and request a new license key, this time without the comma.
In the case of the missing user permissions, the license must also be deleted, and a temporary non-AD license requested. That will restore access for the user to change at least one user to Data Finder Administrator. Note that the even though the user credentials are validated against AD, they Data Finder permissions are stored in the repository. That means that the user names must match the AD names. This may necessitate copying some users to new names and then assigning permissions. Once at least one Administrator exists, the AD license can be reapplied and should operate normally.