[Samba] Q: Samba AD, Pfsense, Windows 10, vpn

[miguel medalha]

>> Unfortunately the pfsense GUI isn't very intuitive or helpful with
>> connecting to AD:

>> "Could not connect to the LDAP server" means everything from DNS to
>> wrong user to missing client cert etc

I too struggled with "Could not connect to the LDAP server". The settings all looked good but still no luck. I finally discovered the cause, a bug in php. Look here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/esxwrv/could_not_bind_to_ldap_server/

Quoting:

" he way PHP requires an LDAP connection to be setup in the environment sometimes gets tripped up when you make changes. It's best to run 16/11 after making any change to LDAP settings.

I'd love to switch to a more reliable method, but it is still broken in PHP 7.3. See https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/9417 for more detail there."


So, after configuring the LDAP page in pfSense, go to the console menu and use option 16 (Restart PHP-FPM) followed by option 11 (Restart webConfigurator). Suddenly, it all works. :-)