Alfresco CIFS authenticator for openLDAP users

Actually, Alfresco provides some CIFS authenticators (passthru, ntlm...), but not for a LDAP subsystem. To solve this problem, we have implemented a component that allows you to use CIFS with openLDAP users.

Installation Guide:

The installation is tracked via AMP package. Stop Alfresco, copy the file in ${ALF_HOME}/amps and use ${ALF_HOME}/bin/apply_amps script to install de AMP. Then copy configuration files to the extension directory:


${ALF_HOME}/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldapSamba/ldapSamba1/ldap-samba-authentication-context.xml
${ALF_HOME}/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldapSamba/ldapSamba1/ldap-samba-authentication.properties


In alfresco-global.properties, an example of authentication chain can be:


authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,myldap:ldap,ldapSamba1:ldapSamba


Note that not all the protocols can be chained, so in order to use the LDAP Samba subsystem, the other CIFS-able subsystems must be deactivated (only one of the subsystems can use CIFS - in fact the first one in the chain):


alfresco.authentication.authenticateCIFS=false
passthru.authentication.authenticateCIFS=false


An example of custom properties are:


# LDAP Connection properties
ldap.samba.authentication.java.naming.provider.url=ldap://ldap.example.com:389
ldap.samba.authentication.base=dc=example,dc=com
ldap.samba.authentication.userbase=ou=People

# The user defined below must be able to execute user search querys in LDAP (administrator)
ldap.samba.java.naming.security.principal=cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com
ldap.samba.java.naming.security.credentials=secret

IMPORTANT: Each LDAP user needs to store the password as an MD4 hash and we will solve this by adding a sambaSamAccount object class to the user profile. This object class and its attributes are defined in the samba.schema file, which is part of the samba-doc package. To install this new schema, have a look at the documentation for your Linux distribution in the sections talking about how to add an LDAP schema to OpenLDAP.

And finally, restart your Alfresco instance.