Windows AD cleartext LDAP in 5 minutes

23 Jul 2007

      Once again FR "just works". :-)

I decided to try LDAP for my clear text PAP authentication against an Active
Directory (so I can get rid of PAM/winbind).  Having read so many horror
stories from people trying to do this, I expected it to be problematic.

It took exactly 5 minutes to get it working.  So I thought I'd share the
details for anyone else googling around for this topic.  There's lots of
stuff about Windows AD using ntlm_auth for MS-CHAP out there, but very
little about clear text using LDAP (that I could find).

The only changes from the out-of-box config I needed to get it working were:

modules {
        ...
        ldap {
                ...
                server = somehost.somedomain.com
                identity = " CN=someuser,CN=Users,DC=somedomain,DC=com "
                password = somepassword
                basedn = "CN=Users,DC=somedomain,DC=com"
                filter =
"(sAMAccountName=%{%{Stripped-User-Name}:-%{User-Name}})"
                base_filter = "(objectclass=people)"
                ...
        }
        ...
}
authorize {
        ...
        ldap
        ...
}
authenticate {
        ...
        ldap
        ...
}

Notes:

   The 'ldap' must appear in the authorize and authenticate sections
somewhere
   BEFORE 'pap'.

   Windows AD uses 'sAMAccountName' instead of 'uid' in the filter.

   You have to provide a valid identity and password, it won't work with
   anonymous binding.

   The filter spec above is in FR 2.x format, in 1.x you need to strip one
set
   of %{} out thusly:

                filter =
"(sAMAccountName=%{Stripped-User-Name:-%{User-Name}})"

I'll no doubt ratchet the basedn down to a more specific domain group and
play with the user and group profile stuff now I have it working, but those
changes got me going.

  -- hugh

Windows AD cleartext LDAP in 5 minutes

Hugh Messenger