LDAP Failover Mechanism in Communications Express

This section describes how to set up and configure LDAP pools and set LDAP connections to improve the efficiency of Communications Express. Some components of Communications Express require connections to the LDAP server to retrieve and manage information. The amount of time required to establish a connection and retrieve information from the LDAP server can be huge if a large number of users are logged in. You can reduce the turnaround time to establish the connection and retrieve information if a pool of LDAP connections are already created which Communications Express can use.

In a typical production environment of Communications Express, an LDAP load balancing and failover mechanism is adopted. Here, one LDAP server (known as the master) is responsible for retrieving information and another set of servers (known as the failover servers) are used in case of a catastrophe (where the master server fails). This way, a single point of failure is avoided.

Communications Express contains an LDAP failover Manager module that is responsible to retrieve connections from the master or slave servers. Each load balancing server maintains a pool of available free connections. Whenever a Communications Express component requires a connection to the LDAP server, the LDAP failover manager provides the component with a connection from the pool of LDAP connections.

To Configure Communications Express for LDAP Failover

To configure Communications Express to create a LDAP Failover Manager, you need to set a few parameters in the uwcauth.properties file.

1. Change directory to uwc-deploy-path/WEB-INF/config/.

2. Edit the uwcauth.properties file and set the following parameters.

   • ldapusersession.ldapport : Set this parameter to the port on which the LDAP server is running.

   • ldapusersession.ldaphost: Set this parameter to the LDAP host list of the LDAP server names. This can be a comma separated list. If the LDAP servers are running on a non-default port; this can be specified by a comma. For example, host1, host2:1290, host3, host4:2546. Here, host1 and host3 are running on the default ports, whereas host2 and host4 are running on non-default ports.

3. Restart the web container on which Communications Express is deployed.