Fair enough.

The big picture;

Creating LDAP/Zimbra users via Drupal based web site.

So far, I've been able to get the LDAP provisioning module (for version 5) to work with a little tweaking as it doesn't assign uidNumber or gidNumber which I found odd.

One has to enable the Samba LDAP module for uidNumber/gidNumber generation which I didn't want to do as I had no real need for a Samba PDC. I got my XP users to auth via LDAP using a free LDAP client for XP called pGina. Besides, have you seen the fromage that has to be added to LDAP for Windows users to auth against it?... very very ugly, it pretty much triples the size of your LDIFs.

Anyways, the LDAP provisioning module now checks the OpenLDAP DB for the highest uidNumber and assigns the next available one which is all I really need it to do.

Now, I want to take it a step farther and have home dir creation with several custom mods like custom .tcsh file, custom .mozilla folders, etc and since this will not only auth XP, but Linux and OSX users, so I had to create a custom dir template for OSX clients.

So I exec call a shell script from the ldapprov.module which does the LDAP provisioning work and which also has mods to assign uidNumber.

Since I am mkdir, chmod, chown, cp/cpio, etc... in privileged areas of the file system, I found that calling exec and modifying /etc/sudoers to allow apache to run this script to be the best way to go rather then relying on built in functions in PHP. And making apache run as root is ass-inine so please don't go there.

I've also integrated this into something called Zimbra so I have user mail accounts (Zimbra calls it user provisioning as it does more then create a user mail box).

Basically I exec call a perl script from the Drupal LDAP provisioning module that syncs my OpenLDAP with Zimbra LDAP and then custom mods some stuff like forcing each new user to change there newly created account having a generic password with something more private, assigning them to various distribution lists, etc....

So basically, when I create (or any one else with the correct credentials) creates a user in Drupal, they get a correctly setup LDAP account, a correctly setup Zimbra account.

Now I realize that either an OSX Open directory or Windows AD solution could have done this all, but we use many custom tools based on a Linux back end and our heavily tweaked Drupal intranet was already here when I came aboard so I had to work within the given constraints. Not that Linux/Drupal is a constraint, by any means, in fact it is liberating.

- aurf

At 09:00 PM 6/29/2009, aurfalien@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi,

So I've taken it a step farther by doing this;

exec('sudo /path/create_user.sh '.($username));

But I would like to back ground this so it doesn't hang the process if it should fail. Plus I read thats its advisable to back ground exec calls.

I've tried several incarnations w/o success.

What have you tried? Without a hint of what you've tried, we really can't help you.

Also, if you can tell us what you're trying to accomplish, we may be able to suggest a better way of doing it. Also, so far you're questions have been pure PHP questions, which don't seem to have anything to do with Drupal, so it may be better to ask these questions on a forum with a dedicated PHP area.

Ken

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