Question

OpenLDAP Internal and External Authentication

Building out a platform that has a number of systems that will each need authentication. Some of these systems are public facing websites that will be used by the public and other systems are internal use only. Started to build out an OpenLDAP instance to support this, but then wondered if I should be doing more regarding public external users and trusted internal users. Could set this up with a ldap domain and then separate children, one for external and one for internal, but that seems like a potential security risk. Do people typically run two ldap servers and use a cron to sync the intranet ldap users to the dmz ldap or is there a best practice for this?


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
December 15, 2016
Accepted Answer

As I am by no means an expert on OpenLDAP I asked our security team about your question. Our director of security’s advice on best practices for this situation is:

Your web presence should leverage a read only slave of the directory, and should only replicate the credentials required for the authentication of the service rather than a full copy of your directory.

For getting a better handle on OpenLDAP best practices and uses this is a great resource.

This comment has been deleted

    Try DigitalOcean for free

    Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

    Sign up

    Get our biweekly newsletter

    Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

    Hollie's Hub for Good

    Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

    Become a contributor

    Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

    Welcome to the developer cloud

    DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

    Learn more
    DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel