OpenLDAP Tips and Tricks

Fri 28 Oct 2011

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Having spent too much of this week debugging problems around migrating ldap servers from RHEL5 to RHEL6, here are some miscellaneous notes to self:

  1. The service is named ldap on RHEL5, and slapd on RHEL6 e.g. you do service ldap start on RHEL5, but service slapd start on RHEL6

  2. On RHEL6, you want all of the following packages installed on your clients:

    yum install openldap-clients pam_ldap nss-pam-ldapd

  3. This seems to be the magic incantation that works for me (with real SSL certificates, though):

    authconfig --enableldap --enableldapauth \
  --ldapserver ldap.example.com \
  --ldapbasedn="dc=example,dc=com" \
  --update

  4. Be aware that there are multiple ldap configuration files involved now. All of the following end up with ldap config entries in them and need to be checked:

    • /etc/openldap/ldap.conf
    • /etc/pam_ldap.conf
    • /etc/nslcd.conf
    • /etc/sssd/sssd.conf

    Note too that /etc/openldap/ldap.conf uses uppercased directives (e.g. URI) that get lowercased in the other files (URI -> uri). Additionally, some directives are confusingly renamed as well - e.g. TLA_CACERT in /etc/openldap/ldap.conf becomes tla_cacertfile in most of the others. :-(

  5. If you want to do SSL or TLS, you should know that the default behaviour is for ldap clients to verify certificates, and give misleading bind errors if they can't validate them. This means:

    • if you're using self-signed certificates, add TLS_REQCERT allow to /etc/openldap/ldap.conf on your clients, which means allow certificates the clients can't validate

    • if you're using CA-signed certificates, and want to verify them, add your CA PEM certificate to a directory of your choice (e.g. /etc/openldap/certs, or /etc/pki/tls/certs, for instance), and point to it using TLA_CACERT in /etc/openldap/ldap.conf, and tla_cacertfile in /etc/ldap.conf.

  6. RHEL6 uses a new-fangled /etc/openldap/slapd.d directory for the old /etc/openldap/slapd.conf config data, and the RHEL6 Migration Guide tells you to how to convert from one to the other. But if you simply rename the default slapd.d directory, slapd will use the old-style slapd.conf file quite happily, which is much easier to read/modify/debug, at least while you're getting things working.

  7. If you run into problems on the server, there are lots of helpful utilities included with the openldap-servers package. Check out the manpages for slaptest(8), slapcat(8), slapacl(8), slapadd(8), etc.

Further reading:

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