For about 3 weekends now I've been thrashing with getting OpenLDAP setup and working on my Suse 9.3 machine so I could test some work contributed by TJ Fontaine for supporting LDAP authentication. I read a lot of great tutorials but I always ran into some trouble. I did manage to get OpenLDAP running and was able to query it but I had problems getting the YaST and Samba integration working. I would run net getlocalsid and it would say it couldn't get either secret but I figured ok at least I can query it but I needed some users with the right schema elements especially a mail attribute. I was using the Samba shema which has a mail property but when I would try and set that using ldapmodify and a .ldif file it would give errors like that wasn't a valid attribute. I think the trouble had something to do with Samba being setup before I configured LDAP and then trying to change the Samba setup to use LDAP it got funky. I decided to try Edd Dumbill's tutorial on my laptop running the latest greatest Ubuntu breezy but it could not find all the needed packages to follow his instructions. I tried updating my sources.list file to see if some of the other repositories had the libraries but for some reason I could not connect reliably to any of the Ubuntu or Debian repositories. Not sure if this is just traffic problems due to the popularity of Ubuntu and the new release or what. I'm sure a linux super guru could have worked past these issues but for a long time Windows guy trying to learn as he goes its been quite a struggle with obstacles at every step. I do plan to give it another try soon with SUSE 10 for my own learning benefit but for now I just needed the shortest path to getting a working LDAP implementation so I can get back to working on mojoPortal.

Then it hit me (just like in the Novell ads ;D) maybe SLES 9 has an easier setup for LDAP, there must be some value added above and beyond what comes in the free version so I downloaded the 30 day eval version last night and installed it this morning. Sure enough you can configure LDAP as part of the install process. Unless I missed something this was not in the Suse 9.3 install. Anyway 30 minutes later I have a working LDAP server and 15 minutes after that I was able to login against it(in mojoPortal) using TJ's changes! Whoohoo!

Now I can get to the parts I need to do like implementing the other 2 data layers to support the new fields and creating upgrade scripts and other things to integrate TJ's changes. I have 30 days before my eval of SLES 9 runs out so I better get working! After that I need to test against Active Directory, in theory it should work the same way. TJ's implementation uses the Novell.Directory.Ldap library that comes with mono. I put this dll into the bin folder of my app on my Windows development machine and was able to compile against it and run under the .NET framework so it will work for mojoPortal installations under Windows or mono.