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Re: Problems creating a Samba4 LDAP Backend

simo wrote:
On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 17:33 -0700, Howard Chu wrote: 
Searching on memberOf doesn't make a lot of sense to me, when you could simply
read the group object directly. When is this actually a useful thing to do? An
alternative would be to make the memberOf overlay intercept these filters and
rewrite them in terms of member.


Premise: here I am thinking beyond what AD is doing as I use the
memberOf concept in another project.

From my usage memberOf makes it very simple to find all the groups a
member is part of even if that membership derives from nested grouping.

Ah, an interesting point, but probably a separate discussion. Note that the OpenLDAP memberOf overlay doesn't handle nested groups.

It's very clear that most of the time you have an identity and you want
to know what this Identity is part of, not the other way.

No, not clear at all. A very common application of "groups" is for things like email lists. In that case, an MTA knows a specific group (the name of the email list), and needs to know all of the members.

Other times (e.g. access control) you know an identity (current user) and want to know if the identity belongs to a particular group (for an authorization check). In that case, it is an equal amount of work to look in the user's entry for a memberOf value as to look in the group entry for the particular member value. In practice, because groups may be referenced frequently for multiple users, the group entries will be hot in the server cache and so the member lookup is actually cheaper.

The frequency with which the question "what groups do I belong to" is asked is extremely low in most applications. The frequency with which the question "is XX a member of this group" is asked is very high in most applications. E.g., the libc initgroups() call needs to know what groups you belong to; that call typically occurs only once at the beginning of a login session. After that the result is essentially cached by the kernel. The result is cached in the kernel because the subsequent "is XX a member of group YY" questions happen so frequently as a process accesses system resources.

So you really want to do a single search on one entry, rather than a
huge search on the whole directory to find out (including local
calculation for nesting) what groups include that identity as member, by
parsing all groups one by one.

It is as simple as that. 

No, not simple at all.

Yes, ideally you would like to be able to look in a single place and get the answer to "what privileges does user X have" but that doesn't actually mean what you're implying. In particular, the "single place" you're looking isn't necessarily that user's own entry. In most cases, that's the worst place to use because users generally have full write privileges to their own data, and the data comprising their set of privileges really belongs to the sysadmin, not to the individual user.

Ideally, you write to the privilege set and read from the privilege set in the same way, in the same place. As an administrator, this simple consistency makes life easier. The memberOf concept is fundamentally broken if you actually rely on it for privilege determination because it is one step removed from how privileges are actually assigned by the sysadmin. (I.e., the sysadmin doesn't assign membership privileges to a user by writing to the memberOf attribute, therefore memberOf is not authoritative.)

Now for what concern the Samba4 problem, I think we should be more
creative and first understand in which cases we might hit a problem with
plugins like memberOf. I am sure some of these cases are just normal
possible inconsistencies that can happen even in a normal AD server if
you do many modifications at the same time. For these cases we just have
to try not to make them more probable or problematic than what they are
now.
In other cases we might think of doing aggressive caching/prediction in
our internal transactions. It might require some more work, but it could
be a viable option, and also drive some more performance as dealing with
an external LDAP is necessarily slower.
Finally, if caching/prediction is not possible, we can think of writing
overlays/slapi plugins directly for the LDAP server of choice be it
OpenLDAP or Fedora Directory Server or anything else. This third option
would require some more work and will be server specific, and perhaps
involve some creative thinking wrt licensing, but it is certainly a
viable option we should not discard. After all, these LDAP servers have
a plugin system with defined APIs exactly to solve those problems that
cannot be solved merely by external interaction.

Agreed. And frankly, there's already an existence proof that this approach is viable.
--
-- Howard Chu
Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/