A LDAP-enabled Zope 2 user folder
Project description
NOTE: Do not install the CMFLDAP GenericSetup extension profile into a Plone site. They are meant for pure CMF sites only and will break Plone.
This product is a replacement for a Zope user folder. It does not store its own user objects but builds them on the fly after authenticating a user against the LDAP database.
Bug tracker
Please post questions, bug reports or feature requests to the bug tracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ldapuserfolder
SVN version
You can retrieve the latest code from Subversion using setuptools or zc.buildout via this URL:
http://svn.dataflake.org/svn/Products.LDAPUserFolder/trunk#egg=Products.LDAPUserFolder
How to upgrade
Upgrading entails not only unpacking the new code, you should also delete and recreate all LDAPUserFolder instances in your Zope installation to prevent errors. A safe upgrade strategy looks like this:
log in as an emergency user
delete all LDAPUserFolder instances
upgrade the filesystem product
restart Zope
log in as emergency user
recreate the LDAPUserFolder instances
How to create an emergency user is described in the SECURITY.txt document in the ‘doc’ folder at the root of your Zope software installation. The mentioned ‘zpasswd.py’ script resides in the ‘bin’ folder at the root of your Zope installation.
Debugging problems
All log messages are sent to the standard Zope event log ‘event.log’. In order to see more verbose logging output you need to increase the log level in your Zope instance’s zope.conf. See the ‘eventlog’ directive. Setting the ‘level’ key to ‘debug’ will maximize log output and may help pinpoint problems during setup and testing.
Why does the LDAPUserFolder not show all my LDAP groups?
According to feedback received from people who use Netscape directory products the way a new group is instantiated allows empty groups to exist in the system. However, according to the canonical definition for group records groups must always have a group member attribute. The LDAPUserFolder looks up group records by looking for group member entries. If a group record has no members then it will be skipped. As said above, this only seems to affect Netscape directory servers. To work around this (Netscape) phenomenon add one or more members to the group in question using the tools that came with the directory server. It should appear in the LDAPUserFolder after that.
Why use LDAP to store user records?
LDAP as a source of Zope user records is an excellent choice in many cases, like…
You already have an existing LDAP setup that might store company employee data and you do not want to duplicate any data into a Zope user folder
You want to make the same user database available to other applications like mail, address book clients, operating system authenticators (PAM-LDAP) or other network services that allow authentication against LDAP
You have several Zope installations that need to share user records or a ZEO setup
You want to be able to store more than just user name and password in your Zope user folder
You want to manipulate user data outside of Zope
… the list continues.
The LDAP Schema
Your LDAP server should contain records that can be used as user records. Any object types like person, organizationalPerson, or inetOrgPerson and any derivatives thereof should work. Records of type posixAccount should work correctly as well. The LDAPUserFolder expects your user records to have at least the following attributes, most of which are required for the abovementioned object classes, anyway:
an attribute to hold the user ID (like cn, uid, etc)
userPassword (the password field)
objectClass
whatever attribute you choose as the username attribute
typcial person-related attributes like sn (last name), givenName (first name), uid or mail (email address) will make working with the LDAPUserFolder nicer
Zope users have certain roles associated with them, these roles determine what permissions the user have. For the LDAPUserFolder, role information can be expressed through membership in group records in LDAP.
Group records can be of any object type that accepts multiple attributes of type “uniqueMember” or “member” and that has a “cn” attribute. One such type is “groupOfUniqueNames”. The cn describes the group / role name while the member attributes point back to all those user records that are part of this group. Only those group-style records that use full DNs for its members are supported, which excludes classes like posixGroup.
For examples of valid group- and user-records for LDAP please see the file SAMPLE_RECORDS.txt in this distribution. It has samples for a user- and a group record in LDIF format.
It is outside of the scope of this documentation to describe the different object classes and attributes in detail, please see LDAP documentation for a better treatment.
Things to watch out for
Since a user folder is one of these items that can lock users out of your site if they break I suggest testing the settings in some inconspicuous location before replacing a site’s main acl_users folder with a LDAPUserFolder.
As a last resort you will always be able to log in and make changes as the superuser (or in newer Zope releases called “emergency user”) who, as an added bonus, can delete and create user folders. This is a breach of the standard “the superuser cannot create / own anything” policy, but can save your skin in so many ways.
LDAP Schema considerations when used with the CMF
The CMF (and by extension, Plone) expect that every user has an email address. In order to make everything work correctly your LDAP user records must have a “mail” attribute, and this attribute must be set up in the “LDAP Schema” tab of your LDAPUserFolder. When you add the “mail” schema item make sure you set the “Map to Name” field to “email”.
The attributes that show up on the join form and the personalize view are governed by the properties you ‘register’ using the ‘Member Properties’ tab in the portal_memberdata tool ZMI view, which in turn is sourced from the ‘LDAP Schema’ tab in the LDAPUserFolder ZMI view. Attributes you would like to enable for portal members must be set up on the LDAPUserFolder ‘LDAP Schema’ tab first, and then registered using the ‘Membeer properties’ screen in the Member data tool ZMI view.
Changelog for Products.LDAPUserFolder
This file contains change information for the LDAPUserFolder product. To see changes for older releases please see HISTORY.txt.
2.17 (2010-05-28)
Added GenericSetup magic to fully provide the INode interface for the exporter and importer classes, making it easier to nest within other importers. (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/586531)
2.16 (2010-04-15)
depend on dataflake.ldapconnection so tests run without any hassle.
Use sha hexdigests instead of digests to build cache keys, digest values can contain non-ASCII characters.
2.15 (2010-04-12)
Changed import/export test code to be compatible with GenericSetup 1.5
No longer force-inject the “fakeldap” module into the module namespace sys.modules as “ldap” for testing
2.14 (2009-12-22)
Updated compatibility with CMF 2.1 and the upcoming dataflake.ldapconnection 1.0
Potential Bug: Avoid cache hash clashes by recomputing the hash when the admin clears the caches in the ZMI (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00629)
Bug: _lookupuserbyattr created its own user search filter and did not take the _extra_user_filter attribute into account (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00640)
2.13 (2009-05-02)
Factoring: Removed the SSHA module in favor of using Zope’s AccessControl.AuthEncoding module to handle password creation for most types of encryption.
Bug: Binary attribute handling in manage_addUser was broken. Only the first character in the binary attribute’s value would be stored.
Miscellaneous: Weed out all LDAP search calls that would indiscriminately pull all attributes from a user record. This will reduce server load if the user record contains large attributes such as jpegPhoto.
Feature: Added GenericSetup support with import/export steps for the LDAPUserFolder. When installing the LDAPUserFolder via Buildout, make sure to specify the extra name “exportimport” to automatically pull the GenericSetup dependency: Products.LDAPUserFolder[exportimport]
Factoring: GenericSetup profile registration and CMF skin folder registration now moved from code to ZCML. Renamed profile “default” to “cmfldap”, that’s a more descriptive name. The minimum CMF version required for installing the CMF integration is now 2.1.0, which implies Zope 2.10.4 or later.
2.12 (2008-10-21)
Bug/LDAPDelegate: Use the canonical explode_dn method when splitting up a DN for escaping its values instead of hand-splitting on “,”, which breaks if the DN contains commas in any value. Patch by Russell Sim. This also required cleaning up one test that used an invalid DN format. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00623)
Factoring: For testing, use the fakeldap module from the dataflake.ldapconnection package instead of maintaining a copy here.
Factoring: Refactored unit tests to use ZopeTestCase and ZopeLite instead of hand-rolling ZODB connections etc.
Bug: Added explicit CMFDefault dependency for the CMF-related functions by adding an extras_require in setup.py.
Bug: Make sure a user is purged from the negative cache when the user is explicitly expired. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00617)
2.11 (2008-08-01)
Feature: The site administrator may now set an arbitrary LDAP search filter expression that will be applied to all user searches in addition to the default filters. Only those user records matching both the default filter and this arbitrary filter expression will be returned. CAUTION: The filter expression must conform to standard LDAP filter syntax. Setting a wrong value will lock out your users! (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00615)
Factoring: Move the LDAP server configuration off the Configure tab in the ZMI to its own LDAP Servers tab to avoid overcrowding the configuration view even more.
Bug: The unit tests for the LDAPMemberDataTool and the LDAPMembershipTool did not run due to a faulty import.
Bug: The ZMI Caches tab erroneously suggested that a cached user’s last access time would be recorded and/or updated. This was not the case, it is recorded at user object creation and then never updated. The Caches tab will now reflect the creation time. Since the API to set or query the last access time was not used anywhere it has been removed. (in response to http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00614 by Stefan Loidl)
2.10 (2008-07-21)
Bug: Recreating the internal cache hash key inside LDAPUserFolder.__setstate__ can lead to values differring from one thread to the next, leading to unnecessary extra LDAP lookups for values already cached under the original key. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00608 by Stefan Loidl)
Factoring: LDAPUserFolder.__setstate__: Removed old backwards-compatibility gyrations.
Bug: FakeLDAP could not handle BASE-scoped searches
Bug: LDAPUserFolder.searchUsers mishandled searches on DN by not passing the correct BASE search scope through. Found by Nico Grubert.
2.9 (2008-06-04)
Bug: LDAPUserFolder.getUserByAttr: The negative login cache used for preventing repeated LDAP requests when a user enters wrong creadentials was keyed on user login alone. This would prevent subsequent logins with the correct password. Thanks to Tarek Ziade for test and patch and Gilles Lenfant for filing the issue. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00605)
Refactoring: test suite: Rearrange imports to prevent error messages when the CMF is not present.
Bug: LDAPDelegate.search: Improve searches on binary attributes such as objectGUID by introducing a method argument that prevents UTF*-conversion of the filter expression passed in. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00576 by Wichert Akkerman)
Feature: Improve binary attribute handlng by introducing a binary flag for LDAP schema items that is consulted when inserting/modifying an attribute flagged that way. Introduce a hardcoded list of binary attributes to no convert from UTF-8 when searching. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00598 Dragos Chirila)
Bug: LDAPUserFolder.getUserByAttr: made login attribute and uid attribute retrieval safer by explicitly providing a default. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00602 by Martin Gfeller)
Bug: ZMI Groups tab: Asking for the type of group via a separate LDAP search for every group listed is unfeasible for installations with large numbers of groups, it is now only done if the total number of groups is less than 50.
2.9-beta (2008-01-01)
- NOTE: In order to use the LDAP-based CMF membership components
you need CMF version 2.1.0 or higher.
Bug: Added a __setstate__ hook for deleting old-style logger instances which were removed for version 2.7 but are now showing up as “broken” objects and may prevent Plone migration scripts from working correctly, pointed out by Martijn Pieters. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00574)
Bug: Removed failing unit test for old-style Zope 2 interfaces that no longer exist in the CMF
Bug: CMFLDAP skins: Cleanups and changes to align the custom skin scripts and templates with their CMF 2.1.0 counterparts
Bug: LDAPMemberDataTool: The “Member Properties” ZMI tab was broken due to a typo in the ZPT code.
Bug: LDAPMemberDataTool: Adjusted wrapUser to match the changed behavior in CMF 2.1.0 and up.
Bug: LDAPMembershipTool/LDAPMemberDataTool: Since the core CMF tools no longer support the IActionProvider interface the tests to prove the LDAP-based versions support these interfaces have been removed.
Bug: The functional test rig setup has been changed to avoid DeprecationWarning-Messages from GenericSetup 1.3 and up.
Bug: LDAPUserFolder.searchGroups: Make the code more defensive for situations where a search would return groups without members, suggested by Nick Davis. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00584)
Feature: Added negative caching for users to avoid querying the LDAP server again and again for invalid logins. Patch provided by Wichert Akkerman. (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00572)
Feature: added a group/membership mapping for group type “univentionGroup” (http://www.dataflake.org/tracker/issue_00569)
Documentation: Noted the danger of trying to install the CMFLDAP extensions into a Plone site: Just don’t do it, you will suffer!
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