Augmenting LDAP
Recently I needed to augment an LDAP service so that we could authenticate users against an Active Directory or an another internal system. This initially looked like a very time consuming task which would get very messy, that was until I stumbled across the ability for OpenLDAP to use a Perl Module for processing LDAP requests.
The documentation for the actual Perl Module side of this is not very good, the best thing to do is to play with the example module to get an understanding of how it all fits together.
Any sticking points? yes, if you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Version 5 in my case) then you
have to get the stable version of OpenLDAP and manually compile and install it (remembering to specify
–enable-perl
when configuring). The version being used by Red Hat doesn’t include the Perl backend
part of OpenLDAP and even if you install their source and try to compile it as a module it fails.
If you require the option to accept a search filter with sAMAccountName
in it then you will need to
create a file with the other OpenLDAP schema containing
attributetype ( 1.2.840.113556.1.4.221
NAME 'sAMAccountName'
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SYNTAX '1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15'
SINGLE-VALUE )
and in your slapd.conf add an include line to include the schema file.
The bind method wasn’t present in the Perl example module I started from and while some people say you shouldn’t do the bind in Perl but I couldn’t get it started without it. Here is an extract of the bind method I used.
sub bind {
print {*STDERR} "==== bind start ====\n";
my ($this, $dn, $pass)=@_;
print {*STDERR} "DN=$dn\n";
#print {*STDERR} "Pass=$pass\n";
my $retval=1;
# Code here to set $retval to 0 if the distinguised name and password are valid
print {*STDERR} "==== bind end ====\n";
return $retval;
If you don’t require a method then simply return the value 53, which is an “unwilling to perform” error.