[ mailman-Patches-871062 ] A MemberAdaptor for LDAP-based membership

Mon Apr 5 09:47:18 EDT 2004

Patches item #871062, was opened at 2004-01-05 17:09
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by the_olo
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=300103&aid=871062&group_id=103

Category: list administration
Group: Mailman 2.1
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: K. A. Krueger (fubarobfusco)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: A MemberAdaptor for LDAP-based membership

Initial Comment:
This is a module, LDAPMemberships, which extends MemberAdaptor to support membership lists based on a search in an enterprise LDAP directory. With this module, you can make mailing lists which, rather than having a list of member addresses stored in the list, query your LDAP server for member addresses whenever necessary.

For instance, if you wish to have a mailing list of all the Vice Presidents in your company, you can express this as an LDAP search: "(title=Vice President*)" and create a mailing list which performs this search and delivers mail to the resulting user accounts when a message is sent to it. This way, rather than manually adding new Vice Presidents to the mailing list, you can simply have Human Resources update the LDAP records, and the change will immediately take effect for the mailing list.

Mailman lists with LDAP-based membership can still have moderators, list policies, and the other usual features of Mailman lists. There are a few missing features; notably:

1. There is no bounce processing.
2. There are no per-user preferences.
3. The Web interface still allows you to try setting user preferences, but if you do you will get a stack thrown at you. (Only the "readable" interface of MemberAdaptor is implemented.)
4. The LDAP settings of a list (e.g. LDAP server and search string) are only administrable by editing its "extend.py" file, not over the Web.
5. There is no digest mode.

To use this module, you must have the "ldap" Python module installed (aka "python-ldap"). Then just put LDAPMemberships.py in the "Mailman" directory (~mailman/Mailman), create a new list, and write an "extend.py" file in the list directory like so:

#####
from Mailman.LDAPMemberships import LDAPMemberships

def extend(list):
    ldap = LDAPMemberships(list)
    ldap.ldapsearch = "(title=Vice President*)"  # members search string
    ldap.ldapserver = "ldap.example.net"  # your enterprise LDAP server
    ldap.ldapbasedn = "dc=Example dc=net"  # your LDAP base DN
    ldap.ldapbinddn = &#039;&#039;   # a bind DN which can read people&#039;s &#039;mail&#039; field
    ldap.ldappasswd = &#039;&#039;   # the password for the bind DN
    list._memberadaptor = ldap
#####

This module has been tested at my site and is in production on a Mailman 2.1.2 installation.


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Comment By: Aleksander Adamowski (the_olo)
Date: 2004-04-05 13:47

Message:
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I suggest this patch to allow senders use any source address
they might have set in LDAP (the 'mail' attribute can have
multiple values!)

--- LDAPMemberships.py.orig     2004-04-01
12:31:54.000000000 +0200
+++ LDAPMemberships.py  2004-04-05 15:40:03.000000000 +0200
@@ -115,7 +115,9 @@
                                        # mail is unique
                                        mail =
attrs['mail'][0].strip()
                                       
self.__members.append(mail)
-                                      
self.__member_map[mail] = mail
+                                       # mail can have
multiple values
+                                       for secondarymail in
attrs['mail']:
+                                              
self.__member_map[secondarymail.strip()] = mail
                                        if
attrs.has_key('mailalternateaddress'):
                                                malts =
attrs['mailalternateaddress']
                                                for malt in
malts:


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Comment By: K. A. Krueger (fubarobfusco)
Date: 2004-03-31 03:59

Message:
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Well, Mailman does a lot more than just keep track of who's subscribed -- 
for instance, restricted posters, list moderation, archiving. 
LDAPMemberships is not meant to be useful for Internet mailing lists with 
people signing up for them, but rather for institutional or enterprise lists. 
These have a lot of the same requirements (moderation etc.) as Internet 
lists, but don't need subscription/unsubscription -- since employees are 
usually required to be on them.

My workplace is using this (well, actually a later version than the one I've 
uploaded here) as a replacement for an LDAP mailing-list feature in 
Netscape SuiteSpot now that we have migrated away from that system. 
We -also- use LDAP-based aliases (in Postfix, not Sendmail, actually) -- 
but for some things we need the moderation and other facilities that 
Mailman has.

For instance, we have an announcements list that goes to all regular 
employees. A simple alias would allow anyone to send stuff to it, and 
certain senior scientists would love to send big PDFs to everyone. A 
Mailman list with LDAPMemberships can have sender restrictions so that 
only our IT Director and our mail systems admin can approve posts to it. 
Archiving is also quite useful for announcements lists.

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Comment By: Chris Drumgoole (cdrum)
Date: 2004-03-31 03:38

Message:
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why use this when you can just use Sendmail's LDAP -> Alias
functions? No need for a mailing list program like mailman..
right?

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Comment By: K. A. Krueger (fubarobfusco)
Date: 2004-01-26 20:35

Message:
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Yet another new version (0.3) of LDAPMemberships.py. This
one fixes some ambiguities with LDAP record handling,
particularly for users with multiple "cn" values, and those
who send mail as their "mailalternateaddress" field address
rather than their "mail" field.

If anyone is actually using this, please email me and let me
know :)

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Comment By: K. A. Krueger (fubarobfusco)
Date: 2004-01-20 16:53

Message:
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I've uploaded a new version (0.2) of LDAPMemberships.py. This one is some ungodly number of times faster, as it does not do redundant LDAP queries in a single load.

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Comment By: K. A. Krueger (fubarobfusco)
Date: 2004-01-05 17:18

Message:
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user_id=944208

Er. SF ate the indentation on my "extend.py" example in the patch description. All of the lines after "def extend(list):" are meant to be indented once.

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