Products.LDAPUserFolder 2.25

Bug tracker

Please post questions, bug reports or feature requests to the bug tracker at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ldapuserfolder

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.

Change log for Products.LDAPUserFolder

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