LDAP: constantly trying to authenticate user 'admin'

[flob]

Hi there!

During the past months I found a lot of helpful information in these forums and posted some solutions back to the community. For my current problem, I wasn't able to get a single clue so far. Maybe some of you could help me out   ops:

I was able to configure Alfresco (3.4d CE, Tomcat 6, SUSE Enterprise 11) to authenticate users against our LDAP services (Novell eDirectory).
My alfresco-global.properties contains the following statements regarding LDAP integration:

authentication.chain=urLDAP:ldap
urLDAP
ldap.authentication.allowGuestLogin=false
ldap.authentication.userNameFormat=cn=%s,ou=myBranch,o=myCompany,c=de
ldap.authentication.java.naming.provider.url=ldaps://ldapserver:636/
ldap.authentication.defaultAdministratorUserNames=myAdminName
ldap.authentication.java.naming.security.authentication=simple
ldap.authentication.escapeCommasInBind=false
alfresco.authentication.authenticateCIFS=false
synchronization.syncOnStartup=false
ldap.synchronization.active=false
ldap.synchronization.userFirstNameAttributeName=givenName
ldap.synchronization.userLastNameAttributeName=sn
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Now, users are able to log in using their LDAP credentials, which is exactly what I intended. But, it seems, no success without some quirk:

Whenever Alfresco is running, every five seconds it tries to authenticate the user "admin", which definitely exists in the tree (ldap.authentication.userNameFormat), but should never be used for Alfresco. I thought this could be avoided by specifying a certain LDAP user as admin (ldap.authentication.defaultAdministratorUserNames), which was no cure.

I also tried to deactivate the "admin" account, which is only possible when Alfresco's built in authentication mechanism is in use, but whenever I switch back to LDAP authentication mode and restart Alfresco, "admin" is reactivated and can't be deactivated again. Again, every five seconds I can see this in the debug logs:

17:38:54,379 DEBUG [org.alfresco.repo.security.authentication.ldap.LDAPAuthenticationComponentImpl] Authenticating user "admin"
17:38:57,458 DEBUG [org.alfresco.repo.security.authentication.ldap.LDAPAuthenticationComponentImpl] Failed to authenticate user "admin"
org.alfresco.repo.security.authentication.AuthenticationException: 08200077 LDAP authentication failed.
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Even

synchronization.syncOnStartup=false
ldap.synchronization.active=false‍‍

brought no change.

As you can imagine, our LDAP administrator is not so overwhelmingly happy, because five wrong authentication attempts render the admin account blocked.

So, please, could one explain to me
a) what Alfresco is doing every five seconds that triggers a login attempt
b) how this can be deactivated

Thank you very much for any hint,

best regards,

Flo

[flob]

And while trying to solve a partly different problem I found the solution to my own question.

The reason for this behaviour is the fact that I tried to authenticate against LDAP exclusively.
But some subsystems of Alfresco depend on the admin-Account and - exclusively LDAP, you remember - tried to authenticate against a non-existing admin-Account in LDAP, again and again.

So I chained LDAP and AlfrescoNtlm for a fallback, if a user is not found in LDAP he/she is looked up locally in Alfresco's user db.
Then I created a particular service user wcmqs_user and provided its credentials within the following files (search for admin and its initial password):

<ALF>/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/wqsapi-custom.properties
<ALF>/virtual-tomcat/conf/alfresco-virtserver.properties
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