Month: March 2015

Simple LDAP server as authentication back end / Single sign-on on Ubuntu 14.04

I have wanted to create an LDAP server as authentication back end for a small student association that I am in for quite some time, but I did not do it yet because of the administrative chaos that LDAP servers seemed to be. I did not find a good ressource which described the best and simplest solution for a simple use case:

  • Create, change and delete user accounts
  • Have several, easily-managable groups
  • Have easily-integrated interfaces for different services (e.g. Dokuwiki)

Most of the tutorials I found seemed overly-complicated, and I did not want to leave an administrative mess for the next person who has to manage the system.

The following (German) blog post described the process in very easy terms. I set up a working LDAP server with OpenLDAP in under one hour (including some testing I did that was not in the tutorial):

http://www.welzels.de/blog/projekte/raspberry-pi/low-budget-nas-mit-einem-raspberry-pi/pi-nas-ldap-server/

I followed the tutorial until “LDAP Samba Implementierung” and had no problems under a virtualized Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server (not on a Raspberry Pi).

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