[K12OSN] SME & LDAP

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2005-07-27 at 10:34, Dean Mumby wrote:
>
> >> I'm setting up an SME server for use as a student webmail server. We 
> >> already
> >> have an existing LDAP server (RHEL 4), is there any way to make SME
> >> authenticate against our already existing LDAP for email user accounts??
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> > You should be able to do this using the pam_ldap & nss_ldap packages.
> >
> > On our Suse 9.1 server it's just a config in YASY or Fedora core I 
> > just ran "setup" and then went into the authentication section and set 
> > things up.
> >
> >
> That sounds fine , but I dont believe it will work for sme as how would 
> the user directories be created. All the web mail /imap folders are 
> created by the subroutines when a user is created in the server-manager.

SME is a highly customized RedHat 7.3.  It adds a web-form admin
interface which builds a database and uses perl scripts to rebuild
program config files as needed with the values from that database.
What this means is that you can make it do about anything you
could do with RH7.3 but if you need to modify config files that
are normally managed by the SME scripts you have to build custom
templates to maintain your changes instead of editing the config
files directly. However, there are a lot of third-party addons
that might do what you need already.  You'll almost certainly
need to add the users locally, but you should be able to find
a script to add them in bulk.  Then if you want to check passwords
against the ldap server you only need to configure pam_ldap and
add it to the services where you want it to apply (I'm looking
at an older version where /etc/pam.d/imap doesn't doesn't follow
the RH convention of referencing system-auth, but maybe that's
changed in the current version that uses dovecot imap).  If you
find a /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/... template directory matching any
file you modify, you must create the corresponding
/etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/... files with perl snippets to
maintain your changes.  

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com