Tag: LDAP

LDAP in Containers

Most of the time, connecting to LDAP is pretty straightforward and is just a matter of applying the right configuration to your application. Or maybe it isn’t even something you need to think about; it could be abstracted away behind an API call. This wasn’t always the case though. In several of my previous jobs, authentication wasn’t just a matter of submitting a username and password; I needed to setup and maintain the system that made that work, both for the server and its clients. Thankfully there was a ton of documentation and guides for making Linux work with LDAP. But what about LDAP in containers?

Times have changed and now we’re building containers, not really needing to worry about a lot of the details of Linux configuration. For the most part, we don’t need much from PAM (and even less from sssd) in containers. That said, sometimes you encounter software that just has to rely on your OS for authentication where LDAP sure comes in handy. Here I describe how to configure your Docker container to leverage LDAP via sssd for users and groups.

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Check for locked out Active Directory user via Ruby

At work, I’ve been working on a lot of automation lately and I ran into a seemingly simple problem that ended up being a bit more complicated than I had first imagined. I have been collaborating on a project that we’re using for auditing Active Directory users and groups and tracking changes to those groups via some simple automation. While that project is interesting in its own right, my boss and I agreed that tackling another helpful automation problem would help our entire IT team: determining if user accounts are locked. I’ve been pushing #ChatOps hard at work through Lita, so adding a plugin for our bot to work with Active Directory seemed only logical.

Context out of the way, making Ruby work with LDAP is a solved problem, many times over. Thankfully, Active Directory exposes most everything you’d want via LDAP, so with a few helper methods, building a few objects tailored to this task was easy work. We quickly discovered that each Active Directory user has a handy attribute called lockoutTime, and even some helpful hints via the interwebs that we just need to check if that value is 0 (meaning the user isn’t locked out) or any other value (indicating, naturally, that they are locked out). Well, this would be a pretty crappy blog post if that was the end, but it wasn’t.
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