Using AD authentication with Uniobjects on Linux

Hey, wondering if anyone is successfully connecting to Uniobjects on a Linux server (a recent Redhat release), using AD authentication?  I'm working with a customer that does not want to use any local accounts at all to connect to Unidata (i.e. the accounts should not be in /etc/passwd or added locally with useradd, they must be AD accounts).  I'm not sure if uniobjects uses PAM and can do that kind of auth.

If you are using AD auth with Uniobjects, is the account you're using allowed to login to the server via ssh?  That's the second requirement - they don't want someone with a service account password using it to login.  I know on windows, Uniobjects requires the account to have the "log on locally" privilege.

Grateful to hear of anyone's experiences with this (especially if it's a positive "yes it works!") or pointers to docs I may have missed :-)

Hey, wondering if anyone is successfully connecting to Uniobjects on a Linux server (a recent Redhat release), using AD authentication?  I'm working with a customer that does not want to use any local accounts at all to connect to Unidata (i.e. the accounts should not be in /etc/passwd or added locally with useradd, they must be AD accounts).  I'm not sure if uniobjects uses PAM and can do that kind of auth.

If you are using AD auth with Uniobjects, is the account you're using allowed to login to the server via ssh?  That's the second requirement - they don't want someone with a service account password using it to login.  I know on windows, Uniobjects requires the account to have the "log on locally" privilege.

Grateful to hear of anyone's experiences with this (especially if it's a positive "yes it works!") or pointers to docs I may have missed :-)

@Ian McGowan 

in RHEL there is the "System Security Services" package - (package name is "sssd") - which allows the RHEL server to be joined to an AD domain.

The setup of sssd does allow for non-local AD users to login and be able to interact, so you should be able to achieve what the customer wants.

On RHEL the file access permissions are used as the data access control, so your database files will need to be setup to allow AD users/groups to access the servers.

The sssd package can be setup to respect AD's server access rights, so if the AD admins deny access for a specific user the user cannot login.

We use sssd with the user override functionality to map AD users to local users, giving AD authentication and local user access checks.

Ian,

The Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) will give you transparent support of any host O/S verification methodology. Once AD is configured then it should 'just work'.

I would always recommend keeping  a backup of a few local users for emergency use if the AD controller should become unavailable for some reason, it is also worth noting that AD access tines and verification speed can be an issue if the network becomes slow.

Once the authentication method works for the O/S the U2 database will still use the the standard O/S user-validation API and this in turn will use PAM however it is configured to validate the user(s)..

Regards

JJ