Victory! Change Active Directory Password via LDAP through browser

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:51:43 +0000

I had to give up on PHP and go to Perl, but it turned out not to be so bad. Users can now change their Active Directory passwords via a self-service web page that doesn’t require admin credentials. The Perl code is below. Authentication to the script is done via .htaccess LDAP authentication, so the REMOTE_USER env variable is assumed to contain the user’s username (sAMAccountName) by the time this script is called. There is a simple check for $ENV{HTTPS} to ensure the script is called via SSL, and AD requires password changes to be done via ldaps, so the whole thing should be encrypted end to end.

LDAP-Active Directory authentication, Part 3

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:12:34 +0000

So I got everything working with .htaccess and AD/LDAP authentication. Just add LDAPVerifyServerCert Off to the httpd config to let Apache authenticate against an AD server with a self-signed certificate (without dealing with the annoyance of putting the cert on each Apache server).

With that piece of the puzzle largely solved, I moved on to another: how will users change their passwords (which are all stored in Active Directory)? For users running Windows this is pretty trivial – they can do it right in Windows when they’re logged into the domain. But what about Linux users? I figured the easiest thing to do would be to make a web form to do this. The user would login (with the http/LDAP auth I previously setup) and the form would ask for their password (twice) and update it in Active Directory. Sounds pretty simple to me. I think if this were OpenLDAP it probably would be, but being AD, it’s not.

UnicodePwd on Evan Hoffman

Victory! Change Active Directory Password via LDAP through browser

LDAP-Active Directory authentication, Part 3