Authenticating against active directory using python + ldap

I was missing

l.set_option(ldap.OPT_REFERRALS, 0)

From the init.

If you are open to using pywin32, you can use Win32 calls from Python. This is what we do in our CherryPy web server:

import win32security
token = win32security.LogonUser(
    username,
    domain,
    password,
    win32security.LOGON32_LOGON_NETWORK,
    win32security.LOGON32_PROVIDER_DEFAULT)
authenticated = bool(token)

That worked for me, l.set_option(ldap.OPT_REFERRALS, 0) was the key to access the ActiveDirectory. Moreover, I think that you should add an "con.unbind()" in order to close the connection before finishing the script.

Here's some simple code that works for me.

import ldap  # run 'pip install python-ldap' to install ldap module.
conn = ldap.open("ldaphost.company.com")
conn.simple_bind_s("myuser@company.com", "mypassword")

This is based on a previous answer.

if you have Kerberos installed and talking to AD, as would be the case with, say, Centrify Express installed and running, you might just use python-kerberos. E.g.

import kerberos
kerberos.checkPassword('joe','pizza','krbtgt/x.pizza.com','X.PIZZA.COM')`

would return True a user 'joe' has password 'pizza' in the Kerberos realm X.PIZZA.COM. (typically, I think, the latter would be the same as the name of the AD Domain)

Based on the excellent ldap3 tutorial:

from ldap3 import Server, Connection, ALL, NTLM
server = Server('server_name_or_ip', get_info=ALL)
conn = Connection(server, user="user_name", password="password", auto_bind=True)
conn.extend.standard.who_am_i()
server.info

I did the above in Python3 but it's supposed to be compatible with Python 2.

I see your comment to @Johan Buret about the DN not fixing your problem, but I also believe that is what you should look into.

Given your example, the DN for the default administrator account in AD will be: cn=Administrator,cn=Users,dc=mydomain,dc=co,dc=uk - please try that.

I tried to add

l.set_option(ldap.OPT_REFERRALS, 0)

but instead of an error Python just hangs and won't respond to anything any more. Maybe I'm building the search query wrong, what is the Base part of the search? I'm using the same as the DN for the simple bind (oh, and I had to do l.simple_bind, instead of l.simple_bind_s):

import ldap
local = ldap.initialize("ldap://127.0.0.1")
local.simple_bind("CN=staff,DC=mydomain,DC=com")
#my pc is not actually connected to this domain 
result_id = local.search("CN=staff,DC=mydomain,DC=com", ldap.SCOPE_SUBTREE, "cn=foobar", None)
local.set_option(ldap.OPT_REFERRALS, 0)
result_type, result_data = local.result(result_id, 0)

I'm using AD LDS and the instance is registered for the current account.

I had the same issue, but it was regarding the password encoding

.encode('iso-8859-1')

Solved the problem.

Use a Distinguished Name to log on your system."CN=Your user,CN=Users,DC=b2t,DC=local" It should work on any LDAP system, including AD

For me changing from simple_bind_s() to bind() did the trick.