10.8. Reverse Group Membership Maintenance

10.8.1. Overview

In some scenarios, it may be desirable for a client to be able to determine which groups an entry is a member of, without performing an additional search. Examples of this are applications using the DIT for access control based on group authorization.

The memberof overlay updates an attribute (by default memberOf) whenever changes occur to the membership attribute (by default member) of entries of the objectclass (by default groupOfNames) configured to trigger updates.

Thus, it provides maintenance of the list of groups an entry is a member of, when usual maintenance of groups is done by modifying the members on the group entry.

10.8.2. Member Of Configuration

The typical use of this overlay requires just enabling the overlay for a specific database. For example, with the following minimal slapd.conf:

        include /usr/share/openldap/schema/core.schema
        include /usr/share/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
        modulepath      /usr/lib/openldap
        moduleload      memberof.la
        authz-regexp "gidNumber=0\\\+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth"
                "cn=Manager,dc=example,dc=com"
        database        bdb
        suffix          "dc=example,dc=com"
        rootdn          "cn=Manager,dc=example,dc=com"
        rootpw          secret
        directory       /var/lib/ldap2.4
        checkpoint 256 5
        index   objectClass   eq
        index   uid           eq,sub

        overlay memberof

adding the following ldif:

        cat memberof.ldif
        dn: dc=example,dc=com
        objectclass: domain
        dc: example

        dn: ou=Group,dc=example,dc=com
        objectclass: organizationalUnit
        ou: Group

        dn: ou=People,dc=example,dc=com
        objectclass: organizationalUnit
        ou: People

        dn: uid=test1,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com
        objectclass: account
        uid: test1

        dn: cn=testgroup,ou=Group,dc=example,dc=com
        objectclass: groupOfNames
        cn: testgroup
        member: uid=test1,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com

Results in the following output from a search on the test1 user:

 # ldapsearch -LL -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// "(uid=test1)" -b dc=example,dc=com memberOf
 SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
 SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
 SASL SSF: 0
 version: 1

 dn: uid=test1,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com
 memberOf: cn=testgroup,ou=Group,dc=example,dc=com

Note that the memberOf attribute is an operational attribute, so it must be requested explicitly.