Credentials are not stored in browser

General Newbie Questions
1

Hi everyone! I recently updated our neo4j community edition database from 3.5 to latest (4.2.2) using the official neo4j docker image. And the browser credential caching stopped working.

In browser I am now greeted by this message when signing in:
" You are connected as user neo4j to bolt://XXXX:8092
Connection credentials are NOT stored in your web browser. "

What could be the cause of this? I have not changed any default settings regarding authentication or the browser..

These are the settings I have changed:

dbms.memory.pagecache.size=5G
dbms.memory.heap.max_size=48G
dbms.memory.heap.initial_size=12G
dbms.directories.plugins=/plugins
dbms.directories.logs=/logs
dbms.directories.import=/import
dbms.default_listen_address=0.0.0.0
dbms.default_advertised_address=XXXX
dbms.connector.bolt.advertised_address=:8092
dbms.connector.http.listen_address=0.0.0.0:7474
dbms.connector.bolt.listen_address=0.0.0.0:7687
dbms.connector.bolt.advertised_address=:8087

Here is the startup logs:

Directories in use:
  home:         /var/lib/neo4j
  config:       /var/lib/neo4j/conf
  logs:         /logs
  plugins:      /plugins
  import:       /import
  data:         /var/lib/neo4j/data
  certificates: /var/lib/neo4j/certificates
  run:          /var/lib/neo4j/run
Starting Neo4j.
2021-02-06 09:38:52.953+0000 INFO  Note that since you did not explicitly set the port in dbms.connector.http.advertised_address Neo4j automatically set it to 7474 to match dbms.connector.http.listen_address. This behavior may change in the future and we recommend you to explicitly set it.
2021-02-06 09:38:52.960+0000 INFO  Note that since you did not explicitly set the port in dbms.connector.https.advertised_address Neo4j automatically set it to 7473 to match dbms.connector.https.listen_address. This behavior may change in the future and we recommend you to explicitly set it.
2021-02-06 09:38:52.964+0000 INFO  Starting...
2021-02-06 09:38:55.011+0000 INFO  ======== Neo4j 4.2.2 ========
2021-02-06 09:39:04.032+0000 INFO  Performing postInitialization step for component 'security-users' with version 2 and status CURRENT
2021-02-06 09:39:04.032+0000 INFO  Updating the initial password in component 'security-users'
2021-02-06 09:39:04.046+0000 ERROR Multiple users matching initial user password from `auth.ini` file: neo4j

The image I use is neo4j:latest, and I mount /data, /plugin, /logs and /import directories when starting the container.

Regards,
Daniel

2

have you configured browser.retain_connection_credentials

and although not centric to this issue your setup with

dbms.memory.pagecache.size=5G
dbms.memory.heap.max_size=48G
dbms.memory.heap.initial_size=12G

seems a bit unusual. Per Memory configuration - Operations Manual

JVM Heap
The JVM has a heap that is the runtime data area from which memory for all class instances and 
arrays is allocated. Heap storage for objects is reclaimed by an automatic storage management 
system (known as a garbage collector or GC).


The heap memory size is determined by the parameters dbms.memory.heap.initial_size and 
dbms.memory.heap.max_size. It is recommended to set these two parameters to the same value to avoid unwanted full garbage collection pauses.

and specifically the last line of It is recommended to set these two parameters to the same value to avoid unwanted full garbage collection pauses.

and also I'm interested in terms of how your pagecache is 5G but max heap is almost 10x larger?

3

Hi dana,

thanks alot for your quick reply..

I've tried to explicitly set the browser.retain_connection_credentials to true (even though this should be default?). And I get the following error:

2021-02-06 15:27:41.430+0000 WARN  Unrecognized setting. No declared setting with name: browser.retain_connection_credentials

Has this feature been changed to a enterprise-only feature?

Regarding the memory option I'm really grateful for your suggestions. I got some errors saying that the JVM heap was out of memory, so I just increased the heap. I'll test setting all values to the same then, thanks again!

4

Hi Again.

I've done some more testing.. just running the docker image with pretty much default settings and I can see that in version 4.1.0 the login-cache is working, whereas in 4.2.0 it is not.

Then I saw this part in the release notes of 4.2.0 (Neo4j 4.2.0 - Neo4j Graph Data Platform)

metrics.filter – The number of metrics set by default has been reduced. The current default set includes:
  "A long list where browser.retain_connection_credentials is not mentioned"

Since it seems like you can only set "browser.retain_connection_credentials" if you have a enterprise license. Does this mean that login-caching was essentially removed from community-edition in the 4.2.0 release?

Regards,
Daniel