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#282 A MemberAdaptor for LDAP-based membership

Mailman 2.1
open
nobody
5
2014-08-21
2004-01-05
No

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 = '' # a bind DN which can read people's 'mail' field
ldap.ldappasswd = '' # 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.

Discussion

  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2004-01-05

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    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.

     
  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2004-01-20

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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.

     
  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2004-01-26

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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 :)

     
  • Chris Drumgoole

    Chris Drumgoole - 2004-03-31

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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?

     
  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2004-03-31

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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.

     
  • Aleksander Adamowski

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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:

     
  • martin whinnery

    martin whinnery - 2004-08-25

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    I've hacked your work about to get it to handle lists based
    on group membership instead.

    You may find it worthwhile.

    http://webserver.offal.homelinux.org/LDAPMemberAdaptor/V3.0/LDAPMemberAdaptor/

    This version's nasty, but you'll get the idea. Wanna roll it
    into yours?

    Mart

     
  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2005-02-01

    LDAPMemberships.py version 0.4

     
  • K. A. Krueger

    K. A. Krueger - 2005-02-01

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    I've just uploaded version 0.4 of LDAPMemberships.py. This
    includes the patch by the_olo to support multiple values in
    'mail', and also fixes a bug reported by Mark Sapiro
    involving importing defaults from the wrong module.

     
  • Viktu Pons

    Viktu Pons - 2006-06-30

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    Hi all, I'm having troubles with this memberadaptor, which I
    can't resolve as I have no idea of python :(

    The fact is that sometimes it works, sometimes not. If the
    query returns few values (this is 50,60) it works fine, but
    when I have to select a huge amount of addresses (say 3000)
    it gives up giving errors such "Can't contact LDAP server".
    Then it puts the message in the shunt folder, and sometimes
    unshunting several times it sends the email, and sometimes
    you lose it forever and can't find where it went.

    Any ideas? Anyone having the same problem?

    Thanks a lot!

     

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