Michael On Security

I’m a proponent of centralized authentication mechanisms, as the complexity of managing the password database for each system can be overwhelming. A lot of organizations are already using Microsoft’s Active Directory product, and it has proven to be rather easy to perform simple authentication against. I’m posting this here because it is certainly security related, and I haven’t seen a quick howto out there covering this specific use case.

Prerequisites

I am testing this on a Debian Etch server, and only had to install the ‘python-ldap’ package.

Code

#!/usr/bin/env python

import ldap, sys

# fully qualified path to your ldap server
# if you'd like to use an encrypted channel, just use 'ldaps' instead of 'ldap'
LDAP_SERVER='ldap://mydomain.local'

# fully qualified AD user name
LDAP_USERNAME='myuser@mydomain.local'

# your password
LDAP_PASSWORD='mypass'

try:
        # build a client
        ldap_client = ldap.initialize(LDAP_SERVER)

        # perform a synchronous bind
        ldap_client.simple_bind_s(LDAP_USERNAME, LDAP_PASSWORD)

except ldap.INVALID_CREDENTIALS, e:
        print "Invalid credentials: ",e
        sys.exit()
except ldap.SERVER_DOWN, e:
        print "Your server appears to be down: ", e
        sys.exit()

# all is well
print 'connected!'
ldap_client.unbind()