LDAP Authentication

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/ldap-auth/article.xml 39632 2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

$FreeBSD: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/ldap-auth/article.xml 39632 2012-10-01 11:56:00Z gabor $

This document is intended as a guide for the configuration of an LDAP server (principally an OpenLDAP server) for authentication on FreeBSD. This is useful for situations where many servers need the same user accounts, for example as a replacement for NIS.


Table of Contents
1 Preface
2 Configuring LDAP
3 Client Configuration
4 Security Considerations
A. Useful Aids
B. OpenSSL Certificates For LDAP

1 Preface

This document is intended to give the reader enough of an understanding of LDAP to configure an LDAP server. This document will attempt to provide an explanation of net/nss_ldap and security/pam_ldap for use with client machines services for use with the LDAP server.

When finished, the reader should be able to configure and deploy a FreeBSD server that can host an LDAP directory, and to configure and deploy a FreeBSD server which can authenticate against an LDAP directory.

This article is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the security, robustness, or best practice considerations for configuring LDAP or the other services discussed herein. While the author takes care to do everything correctly, he does not address security issues beyond a general scope. This article should be considered to lay the theoretical groundwork only, and any actual implementation should be accompanied by careful requirement analysis.