21st January 2008 - 5 minutes read time
Using a simple .htpasswd to password protect a directory or website is fine if you only have a few users, and they don't change very much. However, this quickly becomes impossible to maintain if you have lots of users. For example, if you wanted to secure access to the company Intranet you might spend quite some time trying to update your .htpasswd file. The best way to do this is to transfer all of the user administration over to an LDAP server and then get Apache to communicate with this directly. The Active Directory (AD) system that Microsoft uses allows LDAP communications, and as this is in use across many company networks it is an ideal candidate to use.
You first need to set of the LDAP modules on your Apache server. Uncomment or add the following lines in your http.conf file. You will need to make sure that the files actually exist as well.
