Can I authenticate linux user accounts (using pam) against crowd *or* is crowd an ldap server

[Colin Yates]

Title says it all :)

At the moment I have an ldap server which linux, jira, bamboo and fisheye authenticate against. I understand that I can stick crowd in the middle for jira, bamboo and fisheye, but I can't seem to find any information on configuring the linux boxen to authenticate against crowd.

If crowd doesn't directly support PAM then it would be great if crowd would act as the an LDAP *server*. The whole point of moving away from a "plain" LDAP server is it is too hard to configure and define groups in.

So, is there a native PAM connector for crowd *or* can I get crowd to act as an LDAP server?

[Martin Cooper · Accepted solution]

You can get Crowd to manage your LDAP server, if set the trust between CROWD and LDAP then can update, and add users groups directly from Crowd.

So whilst it isn't an LDAP server in its own right it can make managing one a lot easier.

[Brenden_Tuck]

There is now a native C .so-based pam module available:  https://github.com/mbidewell/pam-crowd-auth

[no_longer_in_sudoers_file]

There is a solution: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/crowd_pam/wiki/Home

Three of us (Sam Caldwell, @Brendan Shaklovitz, and Zach Boody) recently used this problem for Atlassian ShipIt 31.  What we built is a working PIP package (which we need to get up to PyPI soon) that will allow users to extend PAM to authenticate against Atlassian Crowd.

Right now this only supports user/pass authentication against Crowd, but we plan on adding SSH key support and additional meta data parameters for user accounts.