This tool synchronises the GoonSwarm account database from LDAP to various bad tools that keep their own account databases, currently our phpBB forums.
LDAP is an industry standard for centralising logins, group and access management which has led to countless applications creating their own half-baked integration with LDAP. One example of terrible software that doesn't do it properly is all forum software currently in existence.
BADS is an Elixir application with currently a single worker process that handles synchronisation.
The worker process sends itself timer messages at an interval specified in the configuration file, on every tick it does the following:
- Fetch all groups and their members from LDAP
- Filter out groups that aren't found in phpBB
- Fetch members for the correlating phpBB group
- Find differences and make the necessary changes in the database
The MySQL driver disconnects sometimes which will mean that one request will fail, also killing the worker process. The supervisor will restart the MySQL connection process and the worker and things will be fine on the next run.
Every expected result is matched strictly.
BADS has a configuration file containing several secrets which are not currently under separate keys. Therefore the configuration file is not in git, but I will be fixing this soon.
The needed configuration looks like this:
# LDAP configuration
config :bads, :ldap,
host: 'goon-ldap',
port: 389
# phpBB target configuration
# Note that the MySQL driver uses Erlang strings
config :bads, :phpbb,
interval: 30,
host: 'forum',
database: 'phpbb3',
user: 'phpbb',
keepalive: true,
password: 'TrumpForPresident2016',
name: {:local, :phpbb_db}