SiteAdmin is unable to create a meeting with a different site user

Anubis1 · ‎08-26-2022

Hello,

I am having an issue when trying to create a webex meeting using the webex RestAPI.

The site admin is creating the meeting while assigning a different site user (let's call him notAdmin) as the meeting host using hostEmail attribute. According to the API document this is allowed for the admin.

Following is the complete meeting create POST request sent to https://webexapis.com/v1/meetings.

(I am masking the real siteURL with <siteURL> below)

{
    "title": "Test Meeting",
    "agenda": "Test Agenda",
    "password": "p@ssword",
    "start": "2022-08-26 17:00:00",
    "end": "2022-08-26 18:00:00",
    "timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
    "enabledAutoRecordMeeting": false,
    "allowAnyUserToBeCoHost": true,
    "enabledJoinBeforeHost": true,
    "enableConnectAudioBeforeHost": true,
    "joinBeforeHostMinutes": 0,
    "excludePassword": false,
    "publicMeeting": false,
    "reminderTime": 0,
    "enableAutomaticLock": true,
    "automaticLockMinutes": 0,
    "allowFirstUserToBeCoHost": false,
    "allowAuthenticatedDevices": false,
    "invitees": [ ],
    "hostEmail": "notAdmin@<siteURL>",
    "sendEmail": true,
    "siteUrl": "<siteURL>",
    "integrationTags": [
        "dbaeceebea5c4a63ac9d5ef1edfe36b9"
    ]
}

However the request fails with the following response.

{
    "message": "The input parameters contain invalid item",
    "errors": [
        {
            "description": "You are inactive User of <siteURL>"
        }
    ],
    "trackingId": "ROUTER_6308DB0C-C22E-01BB-0413-0AFDD8A60413"
}

I don't even understand what it means by "You are inactive User of <siteURL>".

Some additional info:

The notAdmin user is not deactivated in the control hub
The notAdmin user can create meetings directly
Both users (admin and notAdmin) belong to the same webEx site.

If I make the same request only by changing hostEmail to have the site-admin user email, the meeting gets successfully created.

Am I doing something wrong or is this a webex issue? I would appreciate if someone can help me with this.

Anubis1 · ‎09-17-2022

The previous issue got resolved after some time as previously replied. Assuming this is a Webex Sandbox specific quirk, I immediately switched to a paid webex account for further testing. Now I am getting the same error with the paid Webex account too. This time I keep getting the same error even after 30+ minutes.

Please note that I am the site admin and I see the user status as "Active" in Webex control hub. I even manually deactivated and re-activated the problematic user. Nothing helped. The user is currently fully blocked from scheduling meetings.

I highly suspect this is a bug in the webex backend. It seems this bug gets triggered when we are dynamically attaching/detaching meeting hosting licenses to/from site users. I have made sure the licenses are correctly assigned. I have tested everything manually as well.

This is a critical blocker for our use case and we can't proceed with the remaining integration work without knowing a reliable fix for this. @hazeena farook can you please assist.

Following is the error I am getting with the paid webex account. I hope you can use the trackingId for troubleshooting.

{
    "message": "The input parameters contain invalid item",
    "errors": [
        {
            "description": "You are inactive User of <siteURL>"
        }
    ],
    "trackingId": "ROUTER_6325DA98-EB42-01BB-0145-0AFDDA620145"
}

Jeff Marshall · ‎09-19-2022

Besides the user that's making the API request, email starts with developer@, there are two other users, kumudu@ and kumudu2.lansakara2@ in that org. Neither of those users have a Webex Meeting license assigned to them, they just have basic space meetings which allows them to do space meetings within a Webex space but not schedule meetings on your teratac.my. meeting site. You'll need assign these users a license for the teratac.my site and after doing that then you should be able to schedule a meeting on their behalf. A user has to have a host license in order to schedule meeting for them.

Anubis1 · ‎09-20-2022

@Jeff Marshall thank you for looking in to this and the reply.

Since we are actively testing the application, if you check the site status now it won't reflect the status at the time of this issue. As mentioned, the application is dynamically attaching and detaching licenses via rest API. At the time of this issue I have manually made sure all the relevant users had hosting license correctly assigned.

---

I think I have narrowed down the issue a bit further. I believe this has nothing to do with licenses but this occurs when you add a user (email) who is previously removed. Sometimes, the webex backend thinks the re-added user to be in a deactive state.

I am talking about the following flow (if you script this and run it multiple times, I believe you should be able to recreate this easily)

site admin invites a new user email, say user@mysite.com, to the webex organization.
user accepts the invitation and has correct permissions
site admin removes the user with email user@mysite.com
removed user can't access webex anymore (all good so far)
site admin invites the same user email, user@mysite.com, to the same webex organization
user accepts the invitation. Everything seems fine in the control hub, restAPI. BUT ...
the user can no longer join/schedule meetings even if the api/controlHub confirms he has a hosting license

I am suspecting webex backend handles user registrations as below (I don't know how exactly this is done, these are just some guesses to clarify my observations).

webex maintains a list of registered users and each user's status separately
when a "new" user is added, he is added to the list of registered users and creates a new status record for the user marking him as active
when a user is removed, he is removed from registered users list and the status record is updated to mark the user as inactive
when the same user is added back, he is added to the list of registered users BUT the existing status record is not correctly/reliably updated to mark the user as active.

The issue is in the last step. Note that this seems to be happenning only sometimes. When the issue is triggered, the webex control hub shows the user as active. However if the user try to create/join a meeting, he gets the error posted in the initial post.

Jeff Marshall · ‎09-20-2022

It sounds like what you're seeing is the affect of propagation between all of the different micro services that have to be involved when a user is created/deleted. If you're going to be recreating users with the same email why not just deactivate them instead of delete them? This can be done via the /people API by doing a PUT and setting "loginEnabled"false, which will prevent them from being able to login until you reactivate them.

Anubis1 · ‎09-20-2022

@Jeff Marshall thank you for the reply. Yes, a propagation delay could explain this. However I find it is still not correct for different parts of the system to be in inconsistent states. i.e. the controlHub and the /people API shows the user as active while it prevents the user from scheduling/joining meetings saying he is inactive.

Nevertheless, thanks for the hint/workaround. We can use that for now.

Do you know an upper bound for the duration it takes for this change to get fully propageted and the entire system to get in sync ?

Anubis1 · ‎08-31-2022

Thank you for the reply.

I am the site admin (I am using a Developer Sandbox) and I don't use Active Directory synchronization. This issue automatically got resolved after 10+ minutes. I just tried the same without any change and it suddenly worked.

I have a feeling that webex is internally keeping some cache. I also feel the SandBox behavior is different to the real system. I hope this will not happen in the production system, if not it's going to be a real issue.

You can consider this thread as closed for now.

hazeena farook · ‎08-29-2022

Hello,

Users can get into this state when deactivated by an admin or by Active Directory synchronization. Kindly engage the site admin to activate this user and try testing the same.

Refer this, https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/bl994/User-Status-of-New-and-Converted-Users-in-Control-Hub#Cisco_Reference.dita_cbcbe77e-abc0-44f1-80bf-a59af9ca5c05
https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/n91reed/View-Active-or-Inactive-Users-in-Cisco-Webex-Site-Administration