I recently became locked out of my StackOverflow account. This was because, back in the day when I first created the account, I set it up to authenticate via OpenId. However, I never ran my own OpenId provider, which seemed like a huge hassle. Instead, I started out delegating to an OpenID provider called MyOpenid. This worked for a while, but eventually this provider went out of business. I then delegated to google, which actually acted as an openid provider for a little while. However, it seems like in the past few years google also stopped providing any sort of OpenId services.

I had a long-lived session with StackOverflow, but at some point it expired. So, unable to log in, I found myself using StackOverflow a lot less. Several times, I had urges to add an answer to a question, or to post my own question/answer pair on some obscure issue, but I would just skip it because I was logged out.

I finally decided to recover my access to my account. I did it using local-openid. Here's how!

1. Install local-openid -- I just did gem install local-openid.

2. Start the local-openid server. I just ran local-openid, which booted up a WEBRick server on port 4567.

3. Forward traffic to the local-openid server from apache. I did this in my <VirtualHost> section:

   ProxyPass / http://localhost:4567/
   ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:4567/
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} !^$
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} openid.mode=authorize
   RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !auth=
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =GET
   RewriteRule (.*) %{REQUEST_URI}?%{QUERY_STRING}&auth=%{HTTP:Authorization} [L]
   

I made sure that this was the only ProxyPass directive that was uncommented, and then ran apache2ctl restart.

4. Attempt to log in via my OpenID at StackOverflow. This caused some output like so to be printed out from the running server:

   localhost - - [23/Apr/2016:19:59:48 CDT] "GET /xrds HTTP/1.1" 200 567
   - -> /xrds
   Not allowed: 172.5.245.84
   You need to put this IP in the 'allowed_ips' array in:
    /home/igor47/.local-openid/config.yml
   

5. Edit my ~/.local-openid/config.yml file. This file had an allowed_ips section into which I added the IP address that was making requests. I also saw a section like so:

   https://stackoverflow.com/users/authenticate/:
     assoc_handle:
     updated: 2016-04-24 01:01:39.873137626 Z
     expires: 1970-01-01 00:00:00.000000000 Z
     session_id: 1461459588.9306.0.1628395514528984
     expires1m: 2016-04-24 01:02:39.873137626 Z
   

I removed the expires key and renamed the expires1m key to expires.

6. Reload the auth page in the browser. Viola! I was logged in!

Hopefully this helps you if you also lost access to some old OpenId account and would like to regain access.