2007 Feb 17 - Sat

Active Directory Authentication with Perl and LDAP

On the monitoring server, I'd like to authenticate users in the following situations:

• various types of tacacs access
• access to portions of the web pages
• authentication to Linux command prompt
• authentication to call detail record tools

I think someone has started a similar authentication capability for NetDisco. In any case, I wanted to see what I could come up with.

I have a basic proof of concept script. All the options are embedded variables. I'll have to factor all that out. In the meantime, it does prove that one can provide a basic Microsoft Active Directory group name, use it to look up the distinguished name for the group name, and then perform a test to see if a user is a member of that group. At the moment, there are no recursive tests to see if the user is a member based upon a group being a member of another group.

The documentation at CPAN perl-ldap-0.34 was helpful for syntax. Microsoft's ADSIEdit MMC was helpful in seeing which Active Directory/LDAP classes/objects contained the meaningful attributes.

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Trading Site of the Day -- StratFor: Global Intelligence Briefings

John Mauldin's regular Out Of The Box newsletter has recurring essays from George Friedman, the mind behind the informative site called StratFor, a site dedicated to 'Predictive, Insightful, Global Intelligence'.

You can get an idea of the types of things they write about forom article introductions on their main page. This is a 'pay for news' type of site, but I think it well worth it for the individual who wishes to get more information of what is happening 'behind the scenes' regarding the global economy and statistics.

Subscribers recieve multiple daily email releases as well as access to the report archives. Typically there is a morning summary of international happenings, an afternoon summary, as well as major write-up on a significant current event. Iraq figures prominently and often, but China, Russia, Europe, and other world locales do get their fair share of coverage.

This isn't necessarily a trading site per-se, but as the markets are global in nature and are affected by international news events, information releases from this site can help shape daily trading moods.

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