[PLUG] common authentication for small server/web site?

[Galen Seitz]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.  I decided to go the ldap 
route.  I now have sshd, postfix, dovecot, apache, squirrelmail, 
subversion, viewvc, and trac running on my Centos 5 machine with user 
and group data contained in ldap.  I have yet to integrate samba. 
Here are the two links I found to be the most useful:

http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/ch-ldap.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-openldap/index.html

One gotcha that I encountered was that slapd requires a file named 
DB_CONFIG in /var/lib/ldap.  It took a while before I stumbled onto a 
link that explained the problem.  Note that the file should be edited 
to better suit your requirements.

   cp /etc/openldap/DB_CONFIG.example /var/lib/ldap/DB_CONFIG
   vi /var/lib/DB_CONFIG

A second ugly bit was my caused by my desire to support both svn+ssh 
and http access to subversion.  This requires running apache with a 
umask of 002 in order to avoid permission problems.  It's somewhat 
ugly to change the umask because apache can be started by either 
apachectl or /etc/init.d/httpd.  I didn't want to have to touch either 
one of these, much less both.  Instead, I hacked a Mandriva spec file, 
and built and installed an rpm for an apache module call mod_umask.

Now, of course, I have more questions, but I'll start a new thread for 
those.

thanks,
galen