Client requires authentication at every launch

📱 Desktop & mobile clients 💻 Desktop
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1

Expected behaviour

After authenticating once with the browser based scheme it should remember the credentials and use that when starting the client the next time.

Actual behaviour

It always asks for credentials at every launch of the OS.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Start nextcloud client first time
  2. Browser opens that requests login
  3. Authenticate
  4. Close client
  5. Reboot OS and start at step 1.

Client configuration

Client version: 3.4.4 (macOS)
osx-21.4.0

Operating system: MacOS Monterey (12.3.1)

OS language: English

Server configuration

Nextcloud version: 20.0.9
OS: Linux 2.6.32

Related Issues

Client always asks for authentication #1716
nextcloud/server#17165
nextcloud/desktop#4281

2

I reopened the bug. I don’t know enough details to give you more hints. I think there could be something different because if it were the case for all mac users, there would be much more reports. Perhaps try with a different server, if that happens there as well, so you can link it to the client only or if the server is possibly involved as well.

Question is as well, do you use two-factor-authentication. After a login, there should be an app password, does this app password still exist (security settings on your personal settings page)?

…

3

I am now using client 3.6.2 (osx-21.6.0), our install of nextcloud is Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.1).

Still getting the web page brought up to log onto nc and authenticate client whenever I launch the computer.

I feel I have missed some instruction or config tip.

4

It’s strange there are a few people complaining. In the bug report it was originally a client version 3.4.x on MacOS Monterey (12.2.1). But the problem appears on different platforms (Linux and Windows). Some clients since then seem to have solved the issue for some but not all. Also to consider is that there are probably a lot of users that don’t have this problem.

Unfortunately there are no instructions how to dig deeper. In case you have two very similar systems where one has the problem and one hasn’t, that could be interesting.

Since the problem exists on different platforms and was solved for some, you might just share a symptom but not the same problem. If you have more specific errors from the logs where it shows why it can’t authenticate … unfortunately I don’t know the internals for this process to help you out.

5

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Sadly, the only symptom is the requirement to authenticate at system launch.

I wonder if there is a setting in the nextcloud.cfg that controls or affects the auth behavior.

6

This was fixed for me. Then after updating to v 25.0.3 it’s mysteriously come back.
I should note, that the update of Nextcloud server has affected the operation of ALL of the clients that connect to it.

This includes a Monterey desktop client, a Big Sur desktop client, and a windows desktop client.
They all forget the authentication after reboot.

7

There was a problem with too many authentication tokens for some users:

but the fix was just done for NC26 (https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/28311) and is not backported to older versions.
So perhaps, they did some other changes that are not linked to this topic but affect authentications/sessions, if you know the version, I’d go through the changelogs on https://nextcloud.com/changelog/ for NC25.0.3

8

thanks for sharing the info. I hope these changes correct the long standing problem.