[Mapbender-dev] LDAP

[Arnulf Christl]

Waldemar Wansidler wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we are planning a mapbender LDAP-Integration. At Intergeo Uli Rothstein
> made the suggestion to develop a module for PostgreSQL, that forwards
> queries to LDAP instead of making changes in mapbender.
> In my mind this would only be reasonable, if this module would be
> generic and gets included in PostgreSQL in general. Furthermore I think
> it is not possible without also making changes on mapbender. Overall
> this would be much more difficult than developing an additional module
> for mapbender.
> 
> What do you think? Any ideas? Which tables would be necessary to map to
> LDAP?
> 
> Best regards
> Waldemar Wansidler.

Hi Waldemar,
I guess Uli will not be available in the next days as he has taken a week off. 

Apart from that one of the basic questions that we need to discuss here is how to map an exisitng user authorization to the Mapbender data model or whether to duplicate the user base in Mapbender right away. 

The problem is that oftentimes there already is a basic authorization in place (for shared file systems, mailing accounts, etc.) but it does not map easily to spatial data. 

Over the past two years we have had regular requests to support LDAP as main Mapbender database (currently PostgreSQL and MySQL) which can be done will in the end not help us a lot because the real issue is to connect to an *existing* user database and still be able to map authorization using the multi-client capabilities of Mapbender. I for one have no practical solution to this problem up the sleeves.

What kind of existing user rights management do you have in place already?

Best regards, 
Arnulf.