Tag Archives: Authentication

Linux Centralized Authentication Using LDAP: Part 2

This is the 2nd Part of the article. You can read 1st part here. Just to let you be aligned with us, we considered

• The name of the central server is ldap1.yourcompany.com with IP 192.168.100.201
• To test the configuration we have another server internal.yourcompany.com with IP 192.168.100.10
• sifatpeter is the name of the user we will use for testing the solution

which was defined in the 1st part of the article. We ensured that the ldap service was configured and the service was up and running. Be informed that the ldap daemon named is slapd, for openldap suit.

Linux Centralized Authentication Using LDAP: Part 1

Using same password to login multiple systems was an ambition for System Administrators from long time back. Network Information System (NIS) was one of the early implementation to achieve that goal. But NIS had few drawbacks which required strong alternative to support the requirement. We know, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) was originally developed to provide directory services based on the X.500 standard. Microsoft used LDAP Active Directory Service and Novell used for Novell Directory Services (NDS) products. LDAP’s inherent features makes it a strong alternative for NIS to be used for central authentication.In this article we will try to show you how you can achieve central authentication system using Linux and LDAP for SSH login.

Apache Authentication with LDAP

Apache HTTP Server is a web server developed and maintained by The Apache Software Foundation. The stated objective of Apache is to create an open source HTTP server that will run on any modern operating system and hardware. In addition to it’s wide platform support, Apache is also infinitely configurable. LDAP, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, is an Internet protocol that email and other programs use to look up information from a server. With Apache+LDAP authentication Apache users are stored in LDAP directory is very useful in single sign-on (SSO) authentication on various Apache servers and LDAP directory. In this article we will show how you can configure Apache to authentication users from LDAP directory.

Prerequisite:

1. Working Apache 2.1 or later
2. OpenLDAP server, client and other libraries and utilities.

Below yum commands may help you to install them if you don’t have them ready. If you don’t have yum you can use similar commands (e.g. apt-get) to install them.