Does the Universal Forwarder Support LDAP?

[rengle]

We use the REST API regularly with several of our Universal Forwarders.

I would like to setup LDAP with all of them so that we can more easily manage who has access to the REST API and also enforce password controls.

I have distributed a TA with our LDAP configs and the password is being hashed and accepted. The Configuration shows up in btool when I run it.

However, when I try and authenticate with an LDAP account the authentication fails. Furthermore, LDAP users do not show up when I query the REST endpoint on:

/services/authentication/users

How do I confirm that LDAP is not running and if it is not, how do I enable it on a Universal Forwarder? Is LDAP handled through cherrypy and is therefore unavailable?

[rengle · Accepted solution]

Found the issue.

Because my splunk.secret file is different for all of these forwarders, my hashed password was not being decrypted correctly. (and therefore the credentials were invalid)

I was able to get LDAP to work by distributing the password in plaintext, then having the forwarders hash it themselves.

In the future I will work to distribute our splunk.secret key to our forwarding infrastructure as well.

For future reference, LDAP is compatible with the Universal Forwarder.

Thanks for your help.

[cboillot]

How did you get this to work? Which files did you have in the TA?

[martin_mueller]

The Universal Forwarder license doesn't have the LDAPAuth feature, so I assume the modules underneath aren't shipped either.

You could of course deploy Heavy Forwarders, those should be able to do what you need - you may need to make sure they're connected to a valid Enterprise license from your license master though.