Linux

LDAP Authentication RPI Tutorial (Part 2)

Last time I spoke of how to setup ldap with PHP and briefly touched on using the “ldapsearch” command. I would like to go more in-depth on “ldapsearch”, and show you how you can use it to craft searches for your PHP application. Specifically for RPI, if the user has a RCS account, they can ssh into “rcs-ibm.rpi.edu” and run the following commands. (RCS-IBM puts you on either clark.server.rpi.edu or lewis.server.rpi.edu, these two have the commands you need on them and run AIX) To briefly review the command:

  • First we add the command, then enter the host you are searching, tell the server to try simple anonymous authentication. Next give the server a base to start the search (I am using RPI specific domain components), finally we have to give the heart of our search. I am looking for any Unique ID (username) that starts with “berk”, and ends with anything “*”.
  • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’ ‘uid=berk*’”

The main part of the search we will be editing is the ending. Here we specify a filter to find the information we are attempting to access. Each LDAP server has different attributes it can give about each object. For example, the ldap.rpi.edu server gives out “givenName, objectClass, cn(full concatenated name, or common name), sn (surname), loginShell,” and many others; while at the same time “ldap1.server.rpi.edu” returns a much different lists of results.

Finding Which Attributes Will be Returned

The best way to find which fields are available is by doing a search without a filter. Just running the search below will return an unfiltered list of everything in the directory, up till you hit the individual servers limit. I am purposefully not publishing results from these searches for privacy reasons; here is some results for me with some data omitted.

  • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’”
  • # berkod2, accounts, rpi, edu
    dn: uid=berkod2,ou=accounts,dc=rpi,dc=edu
    sn: Berkowitz
    cn: Berkowitz, Daniel
    objectClass: top
    objectClass: posixAccount
    objectClass: inetOrgPerson
    objectClass: eduPerson
    objectClass: rpiDirent
    objectClass: mailRecipient
    objectClass: organizationalPerson
    objectClass: person
    uid: berkod2
    loginShell: /bin/bash
    uidNumber: #####
    mailAlternateAddress: berkod2@rpi.edu
    givenName: Daniel
    gecos: Daniel  Berkowitz
    rpiclusterhomedir: /home/berkod2
    description: PRIMARY-STU
    homeDirectory: /home/06/berkod2
    gidNumber: ###

Now that we have an idea about the data structure and what this server has on it we can reverse the lookup and tweak it. I know ‘uid’ will be the username, and I can get the users name from that! So using CAS I can log a user in and get their username, then I can lookup there LDAP information. (EXAMPLE 1) If a user enters a name, then a user can search for their UID doing the reverse. (EXAMPLE 2) The wild card can also be used if the full name is not known. (EXAMPLE 3) Last we can use multiple fields, combining these ideas to narrow down the result. (Example 4)

  • Example 1
    • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’ ‘uid=berkod2’”
  • Example 2
    • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’ ‘sn=Berkowitz’”
  • Example 3
    • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’ ‘sn=Berko*’”
  • Example 4
    • “ldapsearch -h ‘ldap.rpi.edu’ -x -b ‘dc=rpi, dc=edu’ ‘sn=Berko*’ ‘uid=berkod*'”

LDAP Authentication RPI Tutorial (Part 1)

After writing about how to use CAS with PHP, I thought I would write a post about how to use LDAP(Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) at RPI but these methods can be used anywhere. LDAP is a protocol to query user databases, this is a protocol that can be sed along with Active Directory, or another directory system for computers and user accounts. This protocol is widely used to allow different applications to interact with your user database. Here I will be showing how to implement search with LDAP to a web application. This guide will be using LDAP with PHP, this requires the LDAP module to be enabled within PHP; that will be the purpose of this article, then the next one will discuss how to actually query LDAP.

LDAP Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) Install

Linux is easy to get LDAP working with PHP, as long as you have a standard installation of Apache, with PHP 5 working.

  1. Install the LDAP module onto the machine, using either aptitude or apt-get
    • “sudo aptitude install php5-ldap”
    • OR “sudo apt-get install php5-ldap”
  2. PHP should now be able to use LDAP, if it is not working yet, you will need to restart Apache.
    • “sudo service apache2 restart”

LDAP Windows (XAMPP) Install

Xampp for Windows comes with LDAP, but there is a bug in their implementation and a file needs to be copied before LDAP will work. I am going to use “C:\xampp”, the default directory for Xampp in this example.

  1. Go into the PHP folder, C:\xampp\php\
  2. Edit the file “php.ini” with any text editor
  3. Find the line “;extension=php_ldap.dll”, and remove the semi-colon. “extension=php_ldap.dll”
  4. Now if you were to reboot Apache it should be working, but its not! Why not? There is a missing DLL. You need to
    copy libsasl.dll from c:\xampp\php\libsasl.dll to C:\xampp\apache\bin\.
  5. Now restart Apache

LDAP Search

Now that PHP can search LDAP we are going to want to start creating queries in PHP; but it is much easier to tweak the search in the command line, and then put that query into PHP. The following are steps that can be taken on a Linux computer (again Ubuntu/Debian) to install and use a ldap command line search.

  1. First we need to install the OpenLDAP utilities that will give us the “ldapsearch” command
    • “sudo aptitude install openldap-utils”
    • OR “sudo apt-get install openldap-utils”
  2. Now we are making our query
    • First we add the command, then enter the host you are searching, tell the server to try simple anonymous authentication. Next give the server a base to start the search (I am using RPI specific domain components), finally we have to give the heart of our search. I am looking for any Unique ID (username) that starts with “berk”, and ends with anything “*”.
    • “ldapsearch -h “ldap.rpi.edu” -x -b “dc=rpi, dc=edu” “uid=berk*”
    • Now this gives one result, and this can be used to see what data will be returned from this server. You can also try “ldap1.server.rpi.edu” this returns a entirely different list of variables, and sometimes more users.
    • If you are interested in researching this command more, die.net has a great resource. http://linux.die.net/man/1/ldapsearch
    • Troubleshooting: For those of you here at RPI trying to follow this guide specifically, if you do not get any results or a error connecting, RPI firewalls the LDAP servers heavily. I have found a lot of the time I have to be in the VCC to make this work, you can also VPN in, then your network connection is within the VCC and it will work. I have VPNed in, while on campus in the Union to get LDAP to work.

UPDATE: I added a little about what LDAP is

Adding Strict Standards, (Or Removing)

I have been developing on a Debian Apache system for a long time, for one of the projects I have been working on I had to run on a Windows Server. After installing XAMPP I noticed that by default, XAMPP sets the developer settings of Strict Standards. Meanwhile the Linux system didn’t have that enabled. I went out wanting to set the Linux server to have the Strict settings to force me to code properly. I found many places that would tell me how to disable strict standards (because users found it bothersome), but after a little searching I didn’t find a clear guide so I thought I would write one for PHP5.

  1. Find “php.ini”
    • Windows (XAMPP): The file is kept under C:/xampp/php/php.ini
    • Linux: For php5 (at least in debian) /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
  2. Open the file and scroll to;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
    ; Error handling and logging ;
    ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
  3. The line you want to edit iserror_reporting =…
  4. Copying the line below will enable strict settings, while other combinations listed below will enable different values.
    • Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT

My Linux box configured itself as  “error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED”, which is the standard for production.

Here is the description that comes with php.ini,

;Default Value: E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
; Development Value: E_ALL | E_STRICT
; Production Value: E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED
; http://php.net/error-reporting