Is there any service that will speak LDAP but just respond with the local UNIX users?

Right now I have good management for local UNIX users but every service wants to do its own auth. This means that it is a pain of remembering different passwords, configuring passwords on setting up a new service and whatnot.

I noticed that a lot of services support LDAP auth, but I don’t want to make my UNIX user accounts depend on LDAP for simplicity. So I was wondering if there was some sort of shim that will talk the LDAP protocol but just do authentication against the regular user database (PAM).

The closest I have seen is the services.openldap.declarativeContents NixOS option which I can probably use by transforming my regular UNIX settings into an LDAP config at build time, but I was wondering if there was anything simpler.

(Related note: I really wish that services would let you specify the user via HTTP header, then I could just manage auth at the reverse-proxy without worrying about bugs in the service)

  • ShimitarEnglish
    1•2 months ago

    This is my jellyfin nginx setup: https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=services:jellyfin#reverse-proxy_configuration

    currently i don’t use any proxy related authentication because i need to find the time to work with the plugins in Jellyfin. I don’t have any chromecast, but i do regularly use the Android Jellyfin app just fine.

    I expect, using the OIDC plugin in jellyfin, that Jellyfin will still manage the login via Authelia itself, so i do not expect much changes in NGINX config (except, maybe, adding the endpoints).

      • ShimitarEnglish
        1•2 months ago

        Well, here is the relevant part then, sorry if it was not clear:

        • Jellyfin will not play well with reverse proxy auth. While the web interface can be put behind it, the API endpoints will need to be excluded from the authentication (IIRC there are some examples on the web) but the web part will stil force you to double login and canot identify the proxy auth passed down to it.
        • Jellyfin do support OIDC providers such Authelia and it’s perfectly possible to link the two, in this case as i was pointing out, Jellyfin will still use it’s own authentication login window and user management, so the proxy does not need to be modified.

        TLDR: proxy auth doesnt work with Jellyfin, OIDC yes and it bypassess proxy, so in both cases proxy will not be involved.