Jive Messenger LDAP Guide
Introduction
This document details how to configure your Jive Messenger installation to use
an external LDAP store when authenticating users and loading user profile information.
Background
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) has emerged as a dominant standard
for user authentication and for storage of user profile data. It serves as a
powerful tool for large organizations (or those organizations integrating many
applications) to simplify user management issues.
By default, Jive Messenger stores all user data in a database and performs
authentication using database lookups. The LDAP module replaces that
functionality and allows Jive Messenger to:
- Use a LDAP server to authenticate a user's identity.
- Load user profile information from a LDAP directory.
- Load group information from an LDAP directory.
Note: Jive Messenger treats the LDAP directory as read-only.
This document will guide you through configuring LDAP support in Jive Messenger. These
instructions assume that you're a competent LDAP user, and that you're familiar
with Jive Messenger setup issues.
Configuration
In order to configure your server to use LDAP:
-
Stop Jive Messenger.
- Edit conf/jive-messenger.xml in your Jive Messenger installation folder as described below.
-
Restart Jive Messenger.
Editing the Config File
Open the configuration file conf/jive-messenger.xml from your Jive Messenger installation in your favorite
editor and add or change the following settings. Properties flagged with (*)
must be set. Properties flagged with (**) must be set in order to enable LDAP group
support, all other properties are optional:
- provider.user.className * -- set the value to "org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapUserProvider".
- provider.auth.className * -- set the value to "org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapAuthProvider".
- provider.group.className ** -- set the value to "org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapGroupProvider".
- ldap.host * -- LDAP server host; e.g. localhost or machine.example.com, etc.
- ldap.port -- LDAP server port number. If this property is not set, the default value is 389.
- ldap.baseDN * -- the starting DN that searches for users will performed with.
The entire subtree under the base DN will be searched for user accounts.
- ldap.alternateBaseDN -- a second DN in the directory can optionally be set. If set, the alternate base DN
will be used for authentication and loading single users, but will not be used to display a list of users
(due to technical limitations).
- ldap.adminDN -- a directory administrator's DN. All directory operations will be performed
with this account. The admin must be able to perform searches and load user records. The user does
not need to be able to make changes to the directory, as Jive Messenger treats the directory as read-only.
If this property is not set, an anonymous login to the server will be attempted.
- ldap.adminPassword -- the password for the directory administrator.
- ldap.usernameField -- the field name that the username lookups will be performed on. If this property is not set,
the default value is uid
- ldap.nameField -- the field name that holds the user's name. If this property is not set, the default value is
cn
- ldap.emailField -- the field name that holds the user's email address. If this property is not set,
the default value is mail.
- ldap.searchFilter -- the search filter that should be used when loading users. If this property
is not set, the default search will be for users that have the attribute specified by
ldap.usernameField.
- ldap.debugEnabled -- a value of "true" if debugging should be turned on. When on, trace
information about buffers sent and received by the LDAP provider is written to System.out
- ldap.sslEnabled -- a value of "true" to enable SSL connections to your LDAP server. If you
enable SSL connections, the LDAP server port number most likely should be changed to 636.
- ldap.initialContextFactory -- the name of the class that should be used as an initial context
factory. if this value is not specified, "com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory" will be used instead.
Most users will not need to set this value.
- ldap.autoFollowReferrals -- a value of "true" indicates that LDAP referrals should be automatically
followed. If this property is not set or is set to "false", the referral policy used is left up to
to the provider. A referral is an entity that is used to redirect a client's request to another server.
A referral contains the names and locations of other objects. It is sent by the server to indicate
that the information that the client has requested can be found at another location (or locations),
possibly at another server or several servers.
- ldap.connectionPoolEnabled -- a value of "false" disables LDAP connection pooling. If this
property is not set, the default value is "true".
- ldap.groupNameField -- the field name that the groupname lookups will be performed on. If this property is not set,
the default value is cn
- ldap.groupMemberField -- the field name that holds the members in a group. If this property is not set,
the default value is member
- ldap.groupDescriptionField -- the field name that holds the description a group. If this property is not set,
the default value is description
- ldap.posixMode -- a value of "true" means that users are stored within the group by their user name alone.
A value of "false" means that users are stored by their entire DN within the group. If this property is not set,
the default value is false
- ldap.groupSearchFilter -- the search filter that should be used when loading groups. If this property is not set,
the default value is ("ldap.groupNameField"={0})
Below is a sample config file section:
<jive>
...
<ldap>
<host></host>
<port>389</port>
<usernameField>uid</usernameField>
<nameField>cn</nameField>
<emailField>mail</emailField>
<baseDN>ou=People;dc=example;dc=com</baseDN>
<adminDN>cn=Directory Administrator</adminDN>
<adminPassword></adminPassword>
</ldap>
<provider>
<user>
<className>org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapUserProvider</className>
</user>
<auth>
<className>org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapAuthProvider</className>
</auth>
<group>
<className>org.jivesoftware.messenger.ldap.LdapGroupProvider</className>
</group>
</provider>
...
</jive>
You'll most likely want to change which usernames are authorized to login to the
admin console. By default, only the user with username "admin" is allowed to login. However,
you may have different users in your LDAP directory that you'd like to be administrators. The
list of authorized usernames is controlled via the adminConsole.authorizedUsernames
property. For example, to let the usersnames "joe" and "jane" login to the admin console:
<jive>
...
<adminConsole>
...
<authorizedUsernames>joe, jane</authorizedUsernames>
</adminConsole>
...
</jive>
Custom Search Filter
By default, Jive Messenger will load all objects under the baseDN that
have the attribute specified by ldap.usernameField. In the
case that the username field is set to "uid", the search for all users
would be "(uid=*)". However, there are cases when this logic does
not work -- for example, when a directory contains other objects besides
users but all objects share "uid" as a unique identifier field. In that
case, you may need to specify a custom search filter using
ldap.searchFilter. As an example, a search filter for all users
with a "uid" and a "cn" value of "joe" would
be:
(&(uid={0})(cn=joe))
The "{0}" value in the filter above is a token that should be present in
all custom search filters. It will be dynamically replaced with "*" when
loading the list of all users or a username when loading a single user.
Some custom search filters may include reserved XML entities such as
"&". In that case, you must enter the search filter into the jive-messenger.xml
file using CDATA:
<searchFilter><![CDATA[(&(sAMAccountName={0})(|(givenName=GEORGE)(givenName=admin)))]]></searchFilter>
Custom Inital Context Factory
Some LDAP servers or application servers may require that a different LDAP
initial context factory be used rather than the default (com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory).
You can set a custom initial context factory by adding the following to jive_config.xml:
<ldap>
... other ldap settings here
<initialContextFactory>com.foo.factoryClass</initialContextFactory>
</ldap>
Connection Pooling
The default LDAP provider (Sun's) support pooling of connections to the LDAP
server. Connection pooling can greatly improve performance, especially on
systems with high load. Connection pooling is enabled by default, but can
be disabled by setting the Jive property ldap.connectionPoolEnabled
to false:
<ldap>
... other ldap settings here
<connectionPoolEnabled>false</connectionPoolEnabled>
</ldap>
You should set several Java system properties to change default pool settings.
For more information, see the following pages:
Note that if you turn on LDAP debugging, connection pooling will not be enabled.
If SSL LDAP mode is enabled, you must set a system property to enable pooling of
SSL LDAP connections.
LDAP FAQ
Can I create new users through Jive Messenger when using LDAP?
No, Jive Messenger treats LDAP directories as read-only. Therefore, it's
not possible to create or edit users through the application.
Why is the list of usernames not sorted in the admin console when using LDAP?
Several popular LDAP servers such as OpenLDAP do not support server-side
sorting of search results. On those servers, users will appear out of order.
However, you can enable client-side sorting of search results by setting
ldap.clientSideSorting to true in the XML configuration file.
I switched to LDAP and now cannot login to the admin console. What happened?
If you can no longer login to the admin console after switching, one of two
things most likely happened:
- By default, only the username "admin" is allowed to login to the
admin console. Your directory may not contain a user with a username
of "admin". In that case, you should modify the list of usernames authorized
to login to the admin console (see above).
- You may have set the baseDN to an incorrect value. The LDAP module
recursively searches for users under the node in the directory specified
by the baseDN. When the baseDN is incorrect, no users will be found.
You can also enable debugging to get more information from the LDAP module. To
do this, add <log><debug><enabled>true</enabled></debug></log>
to your conf/jive_messenger.xml file. Log statements will be written
to the logs/debug.log file.