Robot Has No Heart

Xavier Shay blogs here

A robot that does not have a heart

LDAP Authentication

Spent the better part of the evening setting up LDAP authentication for my boxen. The portage issue I mentioned prior was because I hadn’t updated portage for like 8 months … my bad. Slapd installed without a hitch on my gentoo server, and I was even able to set it up with an SSL certificate. The problems came getting pam_ldap setup on my ubuntu client. I’m not really sure what I did, but part of my problem was installing all the packages a few days ago, and then changing my mind on the configuration today but not reinstalling the packages. As such, I learnt a handy new command, to reconfigure without reinstall:

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dpkg-reconfigure libpam-ldap
dpkg-reconfigure libnss-ldap

I’d also warn against using the libnss-ldap sample nsswitch.conf without a contigency plan – I wasn’t able to execute commands (ls, sudo) after using it, and my machine wouldn’t reboot properly, even in recovery mode. Moral of the story – Always have a LiveCD handy!

I’m at the point now where everything seems to work … except passwd. When changing my password I get “passwd: Authentication information cannot be recovered”. Posted something on the forums, hopefully someone helps me out.

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