h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no wrote:

Pierangelo Masarati writes:

...

Fixed in HEAD. Now all backends honor rootdn bind (with slight variations; see back-null) through a common interface; in some cases, it's a blind fix (shell, perl, passwd). I think I also fixed an inconsistency in back-bdb: as far as I understand, a bind with rootdn and incorrect rootdn password, or in case rootpw was null, originally passed through, probably either by mistake or to check if an analogous identity were defined in the database. I consider this an inconsistency, but please review.

The back-bdb behavior sounds right: It should remain possible to have the rootdn's password in an entry instead of in slapd.conf. Among other things, if the site has routines for regular password changes and "your password is getting old" warnings, those will then cover rootdn as well.

(But aging out the administrator's password is a good way to lock yourself out of your system. Note that ppolicy always lets the rootdn past all policy checks for this reason.)

OTOH if such an entry and rootpw both exist, I think it's a bug to accept both passwords. I think an existing rootpw should override the entry's password, that's safest and least surprising (if the admin sets rootpw and someone else manages to create an entry with dn: <rootdn>).

I disagree; this behavior has existed for a long time and there are probably people out there relying on it. This isn't much different from the fact that userPassword itself is multivalued. I seem to recall this behavior being documented somewhere, can't find the reference at the moment.

A few icky issues:

• if you've got rootdn from a SASL/EXTERNAL DN and rewrite it to inside the database's DIT, it would be possible to create such an entry with a password. We could advise people to use a DN outside the database suffix in this case, and/or accept 'rootpw' with no parameter as explicitly refusing Simple Bind with the rootdn.

I don't think these cases merit any special consideration.

• back-null's "bind on" (accept Simple Bind with any password). Maybe in this case it's best to treat rootdn without rootpw as "reject simple bind as rootdn", like your patch does.

If "bind on" means "accept Simple Bind with any password" then rootpw should be irrelevant here. Of course, for back-null the rootdn itself is pretty meaningless.