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Date:      Mon, 15 Jul 2013 21:35:22 +0200
From:      Jan Bramkamp <crest@rlwinm.de>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: LDAP authentication confusion
Message-ID:  <51E44EFA.2090207@rlwinm.de>
In-Reply-To: <1373916303.17449.140661255966229.44609E69@webmail.messagingengine.com>
References:  <Pine.GSO.4.64.1307151438370.8901@sea.ntplx.net> <CAHDg04v8xV-yaCXDzSbOzWEvHRMhDy8x0A=B2eho4iK4b1UuJA@mail.gmail.com> <Pine.GSO.4.64.1307151507130.8901@sea.ntplx.net> <51E44B55.6030005@rlwinm.de> <1373916303.17449.140661255966229.44609E69@webmail.messagingengine.com>

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On 15.07.2013 21:25, Mark Felder wrote:> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013, at 14:19,
Jan Bramkamp wrote:
>>
>> More than that. In my opinion it should be updated by replacing nss_ldap
>> and pam_ldap with nss-pam-ldapd which splits the job of both into a
>> shared daemon talking to the LDAP server and small stubs linked into the
>> NSS / PAM using process talking to the local daemon. This allows useable
>> timeout handling and client certificates with save permissions.
>>
>
> And if the daemon ever crashes, we can't login to our customer servers
> (assuming they nuked our local account because they have root access).
>
> That's the one issue I have with that daemon and why we haven't migrated
> to it. We should re-evaluate it, though.

In that case run nslcd in foreground with some kind of watchdog. Their
are several examples of this in the ports tree e.g. daemontools. So far
i never ran into this problem because nslcd on any of my production
systems. I prefer nss-pam-ldapd over nss_ldap + pam_ldap because:
- It doesn't link libldap, liblber, libsasl, libssl etc. into nearly
every process.
- It keeps the LDAP connection open reducing the latency (important with
DHE-RSA ciphersuites).
- It handles timeouts in one place instead of timing out in every process.

This doesn't change the fact that the nslcd daemon is a single point of
failure for all LDAP accesses over NSS and PAM.



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