Empower Information Systems

The Barracuda Spam Firewall is hands down, the absolute best spam filter / gateway I have ever used. It rocks, and if you don’t believe me, shoot me an email at jholbrook@empoweris.com and I will get you a 30 day trial.

I spent the better part of today learning how to properly configure my Barracuda Spam Firewall. During the configuration, I decided that it would be in the best interest of Empower to integrate LDAP connectivity in order to help protect against dictionary spam attacks and aid in auto white listing of Valid Email addresses. Auto white listing will also aid in the training of the Barracuda Spam Firewall Bayesian filter.

That is when the fun began. I was attempting to do the LDAP integration and I began to beat my head. I kept getting test unsuccessful. I hit the web to find out what I was doing wrong. When it comes to Barracuda, I think the best place to go is their support forums. I found the posting for the most part relevant and informative. Anyway enough of that. The documentation i had to go on that comes stock with the Barracuda was not working for me. When i look at the LDAP log I was getting two main errors:

• failed to bind to LDAP server empdc01: Invalid credentials
• In order to perform this operation a successful bind must be completed on the connection., data 0, vece
  LDAP verify failed on user ******@empoweris.com: Connection failed

So for anyone who is going through this or may go through this, below is a screen shot and a description of how I fixed my issue. I hope in advance that this will save anyone working on this a lot of time troubleshooting something that I found had a relatively simple fix.

This is what you need to do in order to get LDAP on the Baracuda and Exchange 2003 working

• Create a new user account and email address with domain user privaledges. I made barracuda@empoweris.com my account
• Do not use an admin account in the LDAP setup, flat out it will not work!!
• forward the email the new user account to the appropriate admin email address. *This is optional
• From the Barracuda login and go to Domain
• Select “Edit LDAP” for your domain
• Scroll Down to Edit LDAP Settings
• Entries:
• LDAP Server: myldapserver.empoweris.com
• LDAP Port: 389
• Exchange Acceleration: YES - This enable the LDAP Feature
• Unify: No
• SSL: NO - this is a preference call, that means it’s up to you ** Requires a differnet port
• Require SSL: No - Again, up to you
• Bind DN: barracuda@empoweris.com ***** This is was the most impoertant for me!!!!
  Use the new account you created above in AD
• Bind Password: blahblahblah*&^%$#@ - whatever the password you created was
• LDAP Filter: Use default
  If you need to speed up the search, you can use (|(proxyaddresses=smtp:${recipient_email})(mail=${recipient_email})) ***At your own risk.
• LDAP Search Base: use default
• LDAP UID: sAMAccount - for Active Directory, different for Open LDAP
• LDAP Email Attribute: mail
• Canary Email: blank
• Valid Email: jholbrook@empoweris.com - any valid email in your domain
• Select Test

If it works, you will see something similar to below:

LDAP Settings

If you have any question, drop them in comments, I will be happy to help if I can.