Re: account locking strategy

[Tony Earnshaw <tonni@hetnet.nl>]

Buchan Milne skrev, on 05-12-2007 07:43:

> > > I have to handle account locking on our directory, so as to keep 
> > > accounts from people not working here anymore. On Buchan's suggestion, I 
> > > used ppolicy sofar, with pwdAccountLockedTime attribute set to 
> > > 000001010000Z to lock unused account. This is really handy to handle 
> > > unix account and web applications account at once. However, they are 
> > > also some drawbacks:
> > Dunno, this is probably all too child-like, but my site has an attribute 
> > 'acountStatus' from qmail.schema. This is because my master provider is 
> > also an MTA.
> >
> > If it isn't set to "active", whoever it is  on the MTA can't do nothing 
> > no more.
>
> Not true, if it is set to nopop the user can still receive mail ...

No, this is not a boolean match, it's a caseIgnoreIA5Match and my search 
filter is '(&(objectClass=posixAccount)(accountStatus=active))'. That 
"active" string is necessary for mail to work for the user.

> However, this is another example of an application-level control
> (objectclass shadowAccount is another example), which means you need to
> jump through hoops to try and ensure all your applications use the same
> attributes in the same way to have a consistent behaviour.
>
> Thus, having a more conventient "lock this user", or "this entry - not
> it's password - expires at this time" method on the directory side would
> be convenient.

Here again this might be too specific, but my sites both use ppolicy for 
all users. That includes the attribute pwdLockoutDuration. If one has an 
alternative policy for locked out users and sets pwdLockoutDuration to 
empty or 0 for locked out users (a simple MOD is all that's needed to 
change policies), the slapo-ppolicy man page states that "the password 
cannot be used to authenticate the user to the directory again until it 
is reset by an administrator".

Best,

--Tonni

--
Tony Earnshaw
Email: tonni at hetnet dot nl