Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a user registry in which authentication is performed using an LDAP binding.
WebSphere Application Server (WAS) security provides and supports the implementation of most major LDAP directory servers, which can act as the repository for user and group information. These LDAP servers are called by the product processes for authenticating a user and other security-related tasks. For example, the servers are used to retrieve user or group information. This support is provided by using different user and group filters to obtain the user and group information. These filters have default values that you can modify to fit your needs. The custom LDAP feature enables you to use any other LDAP server, which is not in the product-supported list of LDAP servers, for its user registry by using the appropriate filters.
To use LDAP as the user registry, you need to know a valid user name (ID), the user password, the server host and port, the base distinguished name (DN) and, if necessary, the bind DN and the bind password. You can choose any valid user in the registry that is searchable. In some LDAP servers, the administrative users are not searchable and cannot be used, for example, cn=root in SecureWay. This user is referred to as WAS security server ID, server ID, or server user ID in the documentation. Being a server ID means a user has special privileges when calling some protected internal methods. Normally, this ID and password are used to log into the administrative console after security is turned on. You can use other users to log in if those users are part of the administrative roles.
When security is enabled in the product, this server ID and password are authenticated with the registry during the product startup. If authentication fails, the server does not start. Choosing an ID and password that do not expire or change often is important. If the product server user ID or password need to change in the registry, make sure that the changes are performed when all the product servers are up and running.
When the changes are done in the user registry, use the steps that are described in Configuring Lightweight Directory Access Protocol user registries. Change the ID, password, and other configuration information, save, stop, and restart all the servers so that the new ID or password is used by the product. If any problems occur starting the product when security is enabled, disable security before the server can start up, to avoid these problems, make sure that any changes in this panel are validated in the Global security panel. When the server is up, you can change the ID, password, and other configuration information and then enable security.
You can use the custom Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) feature to support any LDAP server by setting up the correct configuration. However, support is not extended to these custom LDAP servers because many configuration possibilities exist.
The users and groups and security role mapping information is used by the configured authorization engine to perform access control decisions.