Gregory Szorc's blog

PHP 5 + SSL Over LDAP Fix

When I upgraded to PHP 5 from PHP 4, secure connections to the LDAP server on campus kept failing. In order to get LDAP communication in PHP 5 to work, I had to use non-encrypted communication, which of course is insecure. To get PHP 5 + SSL over LDAP working, simply do the following:

1. Add TLS_REQCERT never to your ldap.conf file (usually /etc/openldap/ldap.conf)
2. Recompile PHP 5 (make sure to do a `make clean`)

   Update 1 (2005-02-24)
   If you have already installed PHP 5, you will need to reconfigure PHP 5 from scratch. Simply doing a `make clean` is not enough! You need to follow the `make clean` by deleting the config.cache and config.guess files. Then, run `configure` with all of your parameters.

3. Install the module and restart the web server

Although the fix is simple, it took me many hours to discover it. Hopefully by publishing this I can save somebody from doing the same.

I'm sure there is an alternate fix involving importing the LDAP certificate to a trusted certs file, but I am not an SSL guru. If you know how to fix it using this method, by all means, leave a comment.

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