README for the Zope LDAPUserFolder Product This product is a replacement for a Zope user folder. It does not store its own user objects but builds them on the fly after authenticating a user against the LDAP database. **How to upgrade** Upgrading entails not only unpacking the new code, you should also delete and recreate all LDAPUserFolder instances in your Zope installation to prevent errors. **Custom login page** Cookie support has been removed for version 2.0 of the LDAPUserFolder. If you want cookie authentication I recommend installing the CookieCrumbler product alongside the LDAPUserFolder to handle all your cookie needs. **Limited non-ASCII character support** If your version of python is unicode-enabled (versions after 1.6) the product will now let you use the full Latin-1 character set within LDAP attribute values and handle them correctly. The exception to this rule is the Distinguished Name (DN) of a record and all its elements. This means the attribute you chose as RDN-attribute (cn or uid) must contain only ASCII- characters, as well as all other attributes that are contained in the DN, such as ou or o or dc etc. **Note**: The UTF-8 encoding will not work with OpenLDAP 1.x **Why does the LDAPUserFolder not show all my LDAP groups?** According to feedback received from people who use Netscape directory products the way a new group is instantiated allows empty groups to exist in the system. However, according to the canonical definition for group records groups must always have a group member attribute. The LDAPUserFolder looks up group records by looking for group member entries. If a group record has no members then it will be skipped. As said above, this only seems to affect Netscape directory servers. To work around this (Netscape) phenomenon add one or more members to the group in question using the tools that came with the directory server. It should appear in the LDAPUserFolder after that. **Why is my site dog-slow all of a sudden?** If you run the following configuration... o python-ldap2.0.0pre1-4 o LDAP server and Zope on the same machine you might run into unexpected slowdowns. This is due to a bug in python-ldap. Consult the following URL for help:: http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/1568/2002/6/0/9027164/ **Note about multi-valued attributes** While the record management in the Zope Management Interface allows handling of multi-valued attributes user objects themselves will not contain the full number of these attributes. I made the design decision to only only expose the first value for any multi-valued attribute because having user attributes that are sequences is unprecedented and carries the risk of breaking a lot of unrelated code that works with the user object. There is also no canonical way of encoding such a sequence like it is being done in the LDAPUserFolder ZMI views (it is being turned into a semicolon-separated string), so even doing it that way would be unexpected for code outside of the LDAPUserFolder itself. **Why use LDAP to store user records?** LDAP as a source of Zope user records is an excellent choice in many cases, like... o You already have an existing LDAP setup that might store company employee data and you do not want to duplicate any data into a Zope user folder o You want to make the same user database available to other applications like mail, address book clients, operating system authenticators (PAM-LDAP) or other network services that allow authentication against LDAP o You have several Zope installations that need to share user records or a ZEO setup o You want to be able to store more than just user name and password in your Zope user folder o You want to manipulate user data outside of Zope ... the list continues. **Requirements** In order for this product to run you will need to provide the following items: * a working LDAP server (see http://www.openldap.org/) * the python-ldap module (see http://python-ldap.sourceforge.net/) **Tested Platforms** This version of the LDAPUserFolder has been written on and for Zope 2.4.0 and up. I am not going to support earlier versions of Zope with my product. I have run the LDAPUserFolder successfully on... - Zope 2.4-series - Zope 2.5-series - Zope 2.6-series For the Zope 2.3 series you might want to look at a different set of products, namely the LDAPLoginAdapter and the LDAPUserManager. These products are not officially supported anymore but they were written on and for the Zope 2.3.x series. You can find more information at: http://www.dataflake.org/old_stuff If you are looking for a similar solution for a pre-2.3.0-site see http://sourceforge.net/projects/zldapadapter/ for the LDAPAdapter. The LDAPAdapter, written by Ross Lazarus and Soren Roug, formed the basis for the LDAPUserFolder. This product is platform-independent except for its reliance on the python-ldap module. If you cannot compile or find a python- ldap module suitable for your platform the LDAPUserFolder will not work. **The LDAP Schema** Your LDAP server should contain records that can be used as user records. Any object types like person, organizationalPerson, or inetOrgPerson and any derivatives thereof should work. After a small code change records of type posixAccount should work correctly as well. The LDAPUserFolder expects your user records to have at least the following attributes, most of which are required for the abovementioned object classes, anyway: * cn (Canonical Name) * userPassword (the password field) * objectClass * whatever attribute you choose as the username attribute * typcial person-related attributes like sn (last name), givenName (first name), uid or mail (email address) will make working with the LDAPUserFolder nicer Zope users have certain roles associated with them, these roles determine what permissions the user have. In LDAPUserFolder-speak, roles are embodied in Groups. Group records can be of any object type that accepts multiple attributes of type "uniqueMember" and that has a "cn" attribute. One such type is "groupOfUniqueNames". The cn describes the group / role name while the uniqueMember attributes point back to all those user records that are part of this group. For examples of valid group- and user-records for LDAP please see the file SAMPLE_RECORDS.txt in this distribution. It has samples for a user- and a group record in LDIF format. It is outside of the scope of this documentation to describe the different object classes and attributes in detail, please see LDAP documentation for a better treatment. **Things to watch out for** Since a user folder is one of these items that can lock users out of your site if they break I suggest testing the settings in some inconspicuous location before replacing a site's main acl_users folder with a LDAPUserFolder. As a last resort you will always be able to log in and make changes as the superuser (or in newer Zope releases called "emergency user") who, as an added bonus, can delete and create user folders. This is a breach of the standard "the superuser cannot create / own anything" policy, but can save your skin in so many ways.