Apache Directory Studio - No More JNDI

In a previous article Apache Directory Studio – JNDI I explained how to keep the JNDI connection to use LDAP over a socks proxy. It looks like this has gone for good this time. The new version of Apache Directory Studio (Version: 2.0.0.v20200411-M15} does’t even have the drop down in the connection settings to choose the provider.

I’m glad I kept an old version in my ~/Downloads folder (Version: 2.0.0.v20180908-M14).

This made me come up with another solution to the problem. Rather than using a socks proxy I used a port forward with ssh.

ssh -L 8389:ldap:389 jump-host

This forwards port 8389 on my local system to port 389 on the ldap server via the jump-host connection.

I wanted this built into my socks connection. That way I only have one script to run that operates the socks proxy and the port forward for LDAP:

#!/bin/bash

SOCKET=~/.ssh/jump.socket
HOST="user@jump-host"
PORT=1080

ssh -M -S $SOCKET -D ${PORT} -L 8389:ldap:389 -f -C -q -N $HOST

To make use of it in Apache Directory Studio instead of putting the server details as ldap:389 I use localhost:8389 and it achieves the same thing.