I am evaluating SAP GUI 7.30rev3 for OS X for deployment in our environment, and appear to have run into a critical problem.
I am testing on a machine with OS X 10.8.3, with the JDK 7u40 early access java runtime.
Our site uses SNC with GSS-API/Kerberos for authentication, but the 7.30rev3 installer does not provide a SNC GSS library, named sncgss.dyld or otherwise, so upon an attempt to connect, SncPDLInit() errors out with 'Unable to load GSS-API dyld Shared Library named "sncgss.dyld"'. The previous release we have deployed, 7.20rev4, does provide a sncgss.dyld library in the application bundle's Contents/Resources/bin/ directory. However, the sncgss.dyld library in the 7.20 release is 32-bit only (for intel processors), and the 7.30 release is 64-bit only. The workaround given in http://scn.sap.com/thread/1851956 to run in 32-bit mode therefore no longer applies.
That thread is almost 3 years old, now, and the other threads I could find about SNC and GSS libraries are as old or older. http://scn.sap.com/thread/2011188 makes the interesting claim that setting SNC_LIB to /usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.dylib is an effective workaround in the poster's environment of SAP 7.20rev5 and OS X Lion, but this has not brought me success. Using SNC_LIB to cause SAP to use several different libgssapi_krb5 shared libraries from different versions of OS X, or even from a locally-compiled version of MIT krb5 (the system library is derived from the Heimdal kerberos distribution), only results in a segfault at runtime. This is not surprising, given that the sncgss.dyld from 7.20rev4 only exports symbols with an sap prefix, such as sapgss_init_sec_context. The interface for these routines is not documented, and even if an external gssapi library did provide the same interfaces, the dlopen()/dlsym() approach used by the SAP GUI would be unable to use an external gssapi library that did not provide symbols with the sap prefix.
The thread in http://scn.sap.com/thread/1851956 includes a link to a (now-defunct) ftp site where a sncgssk5.dyld could be downloaded, but I believe that the libraries available there would only have been 32-bit anyway.
I have therefore come to the conclusion that the SAP GUI 7.30rev3 for OS X is simply not usable with SNC/GSS/Kerberos unless SAP supplies a library that provides the sncgss interface. I would be delighted if this conclusion was incorrect, and would appreciate additional (hopefully authoritative) information on the subject. Perhaps there are plans to supply such a library in a future update?
