I needed to authenticate a website for a schoole against an Active Directory server today. I found the job surprisingly easy.
My first attempt was using a pam smb module, and an apache pam module. This worked well, but had a couple of flaws:
Oh well, scraped that idea.
I looked at the smb modules for apache. This was a port of the pam_smb module to the apache api, didn't really gain me much, except it removed the limitation on one /etc/pam.d/ file for apache. Not that this really was much of a problem if you didn't have group support.
my final approach to the problem was an ldap authentication module for apache. This hit the nail on the head.
The major stumbling block I had was trying to find out the BaseDN. If you bind anonymously you can't search or anything useful. To bind as someone useful, you have to know their dn, including the BaseDN. Turns out the BaseDN was the name of the 'domain' with dc1?'s inserted. so if your domain is 'example.com', your baseDN is dc=example,dc=com. I'm not sure if this can be configured to be something else.
<Directory /var/www/staff>
AuthLDAPURL ldap://ads.example.com:389/OU=Users,OU=Teachers,DC=example,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=user) AuthLDAPBindDN cn=user,cn=Users,dc=example,dc=com AuthLDAPBindPassword password-here AuthType? Basic AuthName? "Mumble School Intranet" require valid-user
</Directory>
/var/www/staff should be the path that you want to secure.
ads.example.com should be the hostname of your ads server, I suspect you can use something like _ldap._tcp.example.com here, but I didn't experiment, comments anyone?
user should be some user which has read privilege to the directory
password-here should be users password
and voila! It worked.
where:
the sAMAccountName is the ldap attribute ActiveDirectory uses for storing the username.
1?: Domain Component
This is caused by mod_ldap trying to use LDAP v2. This appears to cause some (unspecified) problems with Active Directory. So I found a patch by Jeff Costlow (j.costlow at f5.com) (may whatever deity he worships provide him with many years of good health and fortune) which allows you to force LDAP version 3.
This prevents the error above from occuring, and now only authorised people can login.
There is a nasty security flaw in mod_ldap that while that error is appearing in your logs you can login as any user (even if that user doesn't exist). This is because when that error occurs mod_ldap fails and returns 0. However 0 turns out to be "success" instead of "failure". Ooops!
One page links to ActiveDirectoryAuthenticationNotes:
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