We have many applications in our company that use LDAP binding to authenticate and authorize users. Most often these applications are sitting on non-windows systems, but there are windows servers as well that do this functionality. The way we have it setup is that we provide a username for the LDAP bind (ldp$<application name> is our standard for the user name) and then the applicaiton passes the applicaiton user/password through through to AD for authentication and authorization. Pretty standard stuff.
We have an application that has periodically lost its LDAP connection over the past few months. The application log (on the application server, not the AD application event viewer) seems to be stating that they are having a user/password problem, but when I check the logs for the LDP$appname account and the application user that is being passed to AD, I cannot find any failed logins at all during the time the application loses its LDAP connection. No other applications are having troubles with LDAP at this time and kerberos is working fine throughout the company as a whole. The problem is "solved" by the application owner rebooting the configuration server. Obviously this isn't really a solution and I would like to know what is actually happening. I keep asking them to call me when the problem is happening so I can do some tests when it isn't working, but they have failed to do so.
What I'm wondering is how I could possibly check for a failed LDAP bind. As I said, I've trolled through the security logs and can't find anything out of the ordinary, but that will only show problems in authentication, it won't show "failed LDAP binds" or similar problems. Is there anything that I am missing? Is there a log that I am not aware of I can check? Even something like successful binds would be helpful, as I could show them successful binds during the outage. Basically I'm looking for anything that would show the problem to be AD related, or anything that would show the problem *wasn't* AD related. Thanks.