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pam_ldap/pam_krb5 Authentication Against Active Directory?
Very Jerry asks: "Here's my problem. I'm currently in the middle of unifying all of our logins here at my place of work because of all the usual reasons (users forget passwords all too often, leaving them more resistant to setting up more complex passwords). Now we have an Active Directory domain setup here, and I was hoping to have all the users authenticate to that. SFU 2.0 is out of the question because it still leaves you to define extra attributes on the user in Active Directory Users and Domains. After a bit of searching, I've found out that pam_krb5 and pam_ldap have been used with success for authentication, but wherever I turn, there are no specific details. I'm currently 2 weeks deep in to this with no progress and a looming deadline. If anyone could point me to some good, specific instructions (specific to Active Directory, not just OpenLDAP) or help me out with a couple tips, it would be much appreciated."
Hi,
We have had similar issues regarding Microsoft's Active Directory product at Amaa Fui. We were switching from a Unix based kerberos system to one that used Microsoft's.
Here are some solutions to the same problems you had. Firstly, you need to patch your w2k boxes to the latest pack. Then install the beta k5 updates from Microsoft beta w2k site. These updates remove the slight changes Microsoft made to kerberos, and thus makes it compatible with your other systems.
Once those are patched in, you need to install Heesi optimizer (This can be found on any download site), I recommend this, cause this would go through your AD configuration and kerberos setup and tell you exectly where your security is weak and so on.
Once everthing is in place, you can move to more secure passwords and corportation wide access to single passwords. But let me warn you, you still need different passwords on resources that are of a criticial nature.
Also ensure everthing is behind firewalls and if your using VPN install the latest patches from Microsoft site, We run OpenBSD and Ipsec, they work very well with the current configuration.
Our systems include, Windows 2k/nt, Linux i386/alpha/ppc, Mac OS 9/X, HP/UX, IBM AIX, Solaris and an old VAX system. All of them are maintained by the w2k based kereberos authentication systme and LDAP for directory stuff.
Everthing works well and I'm very satisfied, only concern we have is that Microsoft's version of kerberos is very slow to authenticate our user. This creates some problems, specially since some of our internal services have authentication decay in it, to solve this problem we just moved to better hardware, but this is something Microsoft has to solve on their own.
Good luck with your setup and hope this helps, if not you can send me an e-mail to, fadaboi@NOSPAM.riyaasath.com
Fadaboi Kesbe
Done at least half of that...
Authenticating users against AD with pam_krb5 works fine. Just list the DNS names of your Win2k domain controllers in the config file just as if they were normal Kerberos servers, and use the AD domain as the Kerberos realm.
When I did this, I still had local passwd and group files. But it should be possible to move that stuff into AD. You would have to modify the AD schema to include that info in the directory (that's not a task for the faint of heart). Once you do that, though, it's pretty easy to query AD from Linux.
Where I work, we master all of our accounts for UNIX and NT, along with all of our email routing, our NFS volume definitions, our automounter configuration, and our DNS, in Ganymede.
We synchronize passwords from Ganymede into NIS, Samba, and our Windows NT PDC. We also configure tacacs and radius, and LDAP from the same master database. Ganymede provides a high quality GUI interface, and allows you to designate privileges over the directory database to as many classes of administrators as you like. Several people can be simultaneously browsing and making changes to the database, and when transactions are committed, a background thread updates all of the network services. Ganymede is the closest thing that the open source community has to NDS or Active Directory, in terms of being a complete management solution, even though it is not based on LDAP and it does not scale anywhere near as well as an Active Directory or NDS. If you are looking to manage a single location, however, Ganymede will do the job right.
Take a look at the web site in my .signature, below. Ganymede 1.0 is due out within the next week, along with a userKit that supports password synchronization for UNIX, Samba, and Windows NT, with password quality checking handled by Clyde
Hoover's excellent nPasswd
passwd validation suite.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Well, you could replace the 2k kerberos auth with MIT Kerberos ...
n ning/security/kerbsteps.asp
http://microsoft.com/technet/win2000/rsvpker.asp
And 2k clients could still authenticate with no problems, but you have a *NIX based KDC, with the obvious advantages that brings.
Microsoft even publishes a step-by-step guide to doing this!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/pla
I'm certainly not a Microsoft fan, but I have to stop FUD when I see it. The above is false. The SMB side of my network is 95/98/NT/2000, and there are no clear-text SMB passwords floating around. The Win 95/98 machines authenticate against the NT domain, and do it without plain-text passwords. Same thing when the Linux machines need to connect to an SMB share. So, sorry, but that's just not true.
They do pass around password information that L0phtcrack can work with, though, so if the passwords are weak, they'll be easily broken. It's essentially the equivalent of sending out /etc/shadow entries unencrypted on the network.
Gumbo