I am trying to setup LDAP Authentication in Joomla using a plugin called JMapMyLDAP (in fact 4 plugins each doing a different job). I need to pull a part of a string out of the server variable REMOTE_USER and this should be visible (we see here http://timplummer.com.au/4-how-to-integrate-joomla-3-with-active-directory-using-ldap.html) in phpinfo();

The issue is that REMOTE_USER is not set or at least not appearing.

A few things to note (if you don't mind) here- conceptually I am not really understanding authentication as a whole subject it appears to be vast despite my years working in websites. Yes I used asp and built php pages to check a user is who they say they are with a token(/session?) that was given to just them and then they are identified when a stateless request is made to the server. Thats my level of understanding. This sounds different to the basic authentication in apache where a password sits in a file and a username and the user needs to login to a basic form to get access to the folder/docs this is via an .htaccess file.

Ok so with the LDAP to work I need to get REMOTE_USER this sounds very reasonable as how else do we know is making the request.

Thank you.