PAM configuration for Windows Active Directory

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Revision as of 08:31, 22 February 2013 by Admin (talk | contribs) (Synchronize time)
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If you want to configure Seon to authentificate users with the configured username via a centralized Windows Active Directory service, you have to configure the PAM security system of the underlying Unix environment.


This documentation is based on the Seonvirtual VMware image, which is based on the latest Debian Linux distribution. If you have any other distribution, you may re-use these information in order to configure your environment accordingly.


Configuring the connectivity consists of several steps, which are described here:

Declarations

In this documentation, several values will be used for hostnames, domain name, usernames and password. These are only examples and must be changed according to your environment.

AD server:

Hostname: win2k8 (192.168.1.65, name resolving works via an another DNS server; FQDN: win2k8.sbs.c-works.net)
Domain name: w2k8.c-works.net

User for connecting to domain (with administrative rights, but without permission to login interactively on AD server):

Username: pamauth
Password: Test4321

User to be authentificated (as an example) and configured in Seon:

Username: seonuser
Password: Test1234

All commands on the Linux side are executed in the context of the user "root".

Network availability

The AD server must be reachable via network on the Linux side:

seonvirtual:~# ping -c 3  win2k8
PING win2k8.sbs.c-works.net (192.168.1.65) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.65: icmp_req=1 ttl=128 time=0.762 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.65: icmp_req=2 ttl=128 time=0.737 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.1.65: icmp_req=3 ttl=128 time=0.659 ms

--- win2k8.sbs.c-works.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2013ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.659/0.719/0.762/0.049 ms

Synchronize time

The underlying security model relies on synchronized time between (Active Directory) server and (Linux Seon) client). Windows Active Directory servers offer a NTP server which can be used for time synchronization.

ntpdate win2k8

If the domain controller server doesn't run as time server, be sure to use the same time source for local and remote time synchronization.