Group Hierarchy via Active Directory Integration

Groups define the organization of a lab. LabStats allows creation of a group hierarchy representing the university’s organizational structure. This provides flexibility in reporting, allowing the use of individual computers or any level of the hierarchy as report criteria. Learn more about managing your Groups and Stations.

Active Directory integration is one way to create a group hierarchy in LabStats.

The IP or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the Active Directory server must be known. Which organizational unit (OU) to use as the Group Root must also be determined. The OU must contain all other OUs and computers that will be included in LabStats.

Navigate to Admin, click External Systems, then click Active Directory Settings. Enter the information gathered from Active Directory:

• Location—The IP or FQDN of the LDAP server (It is possible to use SSL with Active Directory). This field will append “ldap://” to the address given, so please do not include any prefixes like “https://”.
• Default Path—The Domain Components of your domain and Group Root (i.e. OU=yourRoot,DC=yourOrg, DC=com).
• User Name—The username of a domain user.
• Password—The password for the domain user’s account.
• Test Station Name—LabStats will use this to verify that the base OU is set correctly so that the station is contained within it (may be nested within multiple groups).

After the AD settings have been saved, you will see three Actions listed at the bottom of the page. The options include:

• Organize Unassigned Stations
  • Allows you to organize any stations sitting in unassigned based on the AD hierarchy. Groups will be created for the stations if matching groups do not exist. Stations that are already assigned to groups will not be affected.
• Unassign All Stations and Reorganize
  • Unassign all stations from their current group assignments,create new groups and subgroups, and assign stations based on the AD hierarchy.  If the existing group structure matches the AD structure exactly (including group name casing), the stations will be assigned to the existing groups. If it does not match exactly, new groups will be created and the existing groups will be left empty.
• Repopulate Friendly Names from AD
  • Comb through the list of users and create assigned names for the users based on the name attribute in AD.
• Using SSL with Active Directory
  • AD server must be set up to support SSL connections.
    • Verify LDAPS is running on the server
    • Setup LDAP over SSL Certificate
• Once the server supports SSL, the settings in the LabStats portal can be updated.
  • The server URL must be updated to use port 636. If you do not specify a port, it will assume you are using LDAP over port 389

The groups will then be created with subgroups, and stations will be assigned.

When using the Active Directory tool, please note:

• OUs are case sensitive when entering the Group Root. If the Group Root is entered incorrectly, LabStats may create the entire Active Directory organization, resulting in unnecessary groups.
• The cloud server instance needs to temporarily communicate with the Active Directory server to collect the organizational information. Please speak with your Active Directory server admin to accomplish this.