LDAP for central authentication?

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 12/02/2009 09:55 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> For the NIS+Samba case, can I merge both credential files into a
> central database using LDAP?   I would also want to control password
> length, complexity, aging, and other things.
> 
> What is the best way to do this?
> 
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Scott

I can't speak to integrating LDAP with the specific systems you're using 
(i.e., NIS, and Samba).  But we recently set up LDAP authentication for 
a bunch of our internal systems (Subversion, Trac, Nagios, etc.) and 
it's worked out well so far.

We used OpenLDAP.  And for the password length / complexity we used a 
combination of 2 things:

1) the OpenLDAP password policy overlay (see: 
http://linux.die.net/man/5/slapo-ppolicy)

2) the OpenLDAP pwdChecker library from the LDAP Tool Box project (see: 
http://ltb-project.org/wiki/documentation/openldap-ppolicy-check-password)

Between the two of them, they were able to meet our password complexity 
requirements.

HTH.  Feel free to email back on or off list if you have questions.

DR