LDAP Authentication

[flyingmonkey]

I have a database that has sensitive information in it and I want to make it password protected. Instead of using the filemaker pro access privledges I would like to tap into our corporate LDAP authentication server for access provledges that way everyone just has to remember one password instead of several. All of my IT buddies are doing it with their MS Access databases and the Windows IIS Servers. I want to show them that FileMaker Pro can do everything that Access can do and more. I have all of the info for our LDAP server but I don't know where to start with it all. Is this even possible?

I can host this solution from either a Mac or a Windows 2000 Server. In addition I have Filemaker Pro 4.0, 5.0, and 5.5 for both platforms. If there are advantages to either platform or version please let me know.

[Vaughan]

I don't think that FMP can do this out-of-the-box. There may be plugins to make it happen, I don't know.

Either way I'd use the Web Security databases for access control, not the built-in passwords. There *might* be a way to use ODBC to download information into the Web Security databases to simulate LDAP functionality.

[Anatoli]

I think it can be done in FM 5.5.

Small story though: NT Server went up in smoke. Repair and installation was 3 days and lost productivity of 20 people.

Not so, I've installed the FM server and data on workstation and because it was just the FM security, it took 10 minutes. Users could not log into domain, but even did not notice, that bellowed CRM is running from workstation!

Try to do the same with Access :-(

[CyberSport]

About a month ago, I launched a university sub-site that did tap into the university-wide LDAP. The site starts on the university side, whereby when the students log in, the system authenticates/authorizes and posts a -find to FMP, running on an NT workstation, passing the user's netID to FMP and locating that record. It's worked flawlessly, the only hitch being that the university will not let FMP have realtime access to the PeopleSoft network, but only nightly ODBC queries. The one problem with this, then, is a student who is new enough to the system not to have a record in our database, but whose netID is already in the university's LDAP database.

Contrast this to the DISASTROUS time I've had setting up the analogous system in Kerberos at another school. Egads.

[Vaughan]

Cybersport

Good lateral thinking there!

[flyingmonkey]

Thanks everyone for your replies and suggectsions.

I have a question for Cybersport.

1. You mentioned "nightly ODBC queries." What are you querying? You aren't getting LDAP user information and importing it into a the web security database because you said that you are using the regular server to authenticate and then it sends them on to the FMP server.

Thanks

Jeff

aka FlyingMonkey

[CyberSport]

Vaughan, thanks for the compliment--it's definitely been a long past couple of months.

Jeff,the system is such that the athletics department at the university needs certain bio-demographic info on the student-athletes. While this info is in PeopleSoft, PS doesn't have an athletics module developed fully yet, so until now it's been awkward to transfer necessary limited info on the students to the athletics dept (a lot of manual transcribing). They have, at one school, permitted me to establish a query on the data warehouse so that we can dump the necessary info into the athletics department's filemaker database. So, we're still housing the info in two places (athletics and general university) but it's not a large university, so it's not too many records. And it's getting the job done.

CyberSport