FMS External Authentication best practice?

[Matts Agelii]

Is there a bullteproof way of setting this up? I went to devcon this year hoping to find some light on external authentificaton. One promising session was Wim Decorte showing how to do it with a Win2000 server in a AD domain. The demo failed... and its still a mystery to me. I want to set up my FMSA on W2003 to authenticate with our Solaris LDAP or our MacOS X Server or - if I must - our AD server. I have gathered some reading on related topics, but no real cookbook on setting it up. Can anyone advise me what to try first?

Best! / Matts

[Wim Decorte]

Is there a bullteproof way of setting this up? I went to devcon this year hoping to find some light on external authentificaton. One promising session was Wim Decorte showing how to do it with a Win2000 server in a AD domain. The demo failed... and its still a mystery to me. I want to set up my FMSA on W2003 to authenticate with our Solaris LDAP or our MacOS X Server or - if I must - our AD server. I have gathered some reading on related topics, but no real cookbook on setting it up. Can anyone advise me what to try first?

Hi Matts,

I was using all Windows 2003 by the way. While it would have been nice if the demo worked, the purpose of the session was to show the process, not so much the end result. As I mentioned in the session the problem was that although the W2K3 FMS box said it had successfully joined the domain, it did not show up in the domain. I also mentioned the fix: drop the box back out of the domain, reboot and rejoin again. 9 times out of 10 that fixes that issue. Unfortunately we were out of time. I think you have to be realistic: starting from scratch, joining boxes to the domain, creating accounts & groups and external accounts in a FM file *and* troubleshooting to success all in just over an hour?

Back to what you have in mind: that won't work. FMS can only authenticate against AD and OD. Not any other LDAP server. Making the FMS windows box authenticate against OD should work, but that's an apple issue more than anything else. the OSX Server running OD must emulate a Windows Domain Controller. Check macwindows.com, they have lots of threads on the issue. The big test is always: if you can log into the FMS box on the OS level (on the machine itself) with one of the external accounts then FMS will be able to authenticate FM guests too.

I think you need to find a good network admin who will get you to the point of being able to log into Windows with an OD account. Once you're there, you're on 3rd base.

HTH

Wim.