Habitually Good

I have been setting up an internal technology blog which will have a group of members contributing to it. The best way (I thought) of managing this was to enable LDAP authentication on the blog so that all those who are contributing can authenticate with our corporate Active Directory.

As it turns out there is only one WordPress plugin for this out there and it’s called wpDirAuth. When I found it I very happily downloaded and installed the plugin, thinking that I am done. Boy, was I wrong. I had to jump through a couple of 100 hoops to get it running, but in the end it was worth it. Here are the problems I faced and the solutions to resolve them.

Enabling LDAP for PHP – after installing the plugin, it turns out that I didn’t have the LDAP module installed for PHP. I got the following error screen:

There are 3 things I did to resolve this:

• Opened my php.ini and uncommented the line extension=php_ldap.dll.
• Made sure that I had the file php_ldap.dll in my PHP\ext directory.
• Made sure that I had the files ssleay32.dll and libeay32.dll in my Windows\System32 directory.

Note that the steps above are for a Windows XP installation. If you have a different system, you may need to Google for how to get LDAP enabled for your PHP installation.

Plugin Version – this is fairly straight forward. I went and setup the values but for some reason I kept getting an “Invalid User” error when trying to login. A little bit of digging in the groups revealed that this was a problem with the plugin version which was incompatible with WordPress 2.5.1 (or 2.5 onwards).

Someone was gracious enough to post a patch. Great. But when I tried to download it the location of the patch was no longer accessible. There was no where on the Internet where I was able to find this patch. I tried to access the plugin directories of those who had installed it, and after a long search found one which had the patched plugin installed. I downloaded this version (1.3) and then installed it.

So that it becomes more widely available, here is a download link to wpDirAuth 1.3.

Finally, the filter problem – after I was done with all this, I thought that I am done. Boy was I wrong. Every time I would try and install this, I would get this error:

Directory Login Error: Directory authentication initially succeeded,
but no valid profile was found (search procedure).

Clearly, my authentication was working, but something else had gone wrong. As it turned out (after trying zillions of combinations),  the problem was with the Account Filter setting for the plugin. The way I resolved it was by trying various LDAP attributes for that setting till one worked. Here is a list of most common attributes (this is the list I used).

And  the setting that worked for me (as you can see above) was userPrincipalName.

Now I enjoy the benefits – once all that was done, it started to work like magic. And I was pleasantly surprised to note that this authentication worked even through LiveWriter which is great.

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