Django Ldap authentication timed out

Question

I am hosting a django-based site on a local machine (I have full access/control to it). This site authenticates users against a remote active directory via the django ldap plugin.

authenticating against LDAP server used to work!

Now, when trying to authenticate against the LDAP server, the request just hangs until it times out. I couldn’t find anything useful in the logs.

The server setup is: NginX, Django 1.3, Fedora 15, mySql 5.1.

I don’t know what logs I should try to look at.
(I've tried looking in nginx access and error logs but to no use.)

Things I tried:

Running the site on django's and accessing it via localhost (not going through Nginx, but accessing python manage.py directly, via the runserver command). this works

Running ldapsearch from the command line. this works

edit: i used wireshark to look at the back-and-forth with the ldap server. the interaction seems to be fine - django sends a request to bind and it receives a success msg, and then sends a search query and a user object is returned. however, after this communication django seems to hang. when i "Ctrl-c" in the django shell after running "authenticate(username=user, password=pass)", the stack trace is sitting somewhere in the django-ldap library.

Please help, I have no idea what changed that caused this problem.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

Active Directory does not allow anonymous binds for authorization; you can bind anonymously but you cannot do anything else.

Check if the user that is being used to bind with AD has valid credentials (ie, the account hasn't expired). If it has, you'll get these strange errors.