LDAP Assistant MCP v0.5.0

First beta release, targeting 389 DS support engineers triaging live instances and SOS reports. Read-only diagnostics suitable for evaluation and internal troubleshooting; tool schemas, output formats, and configuration fields may still change before 1.0.0.

Added

Support-engineer workflow

• Mode errors now teach the workflow: refusing a live-only tool on an offline/archive server (and archive-only tools on live servers, log tools on remote servers) names the tools that DO work there — try_instead in error dicts, alternatives listed in LiveServerRequired messages
• Admin playbooks: docs/playbooks/archive-sos.md (summarize an SOS report before opening the case) and docs/playbooks/install-troubleshooting.md (python-ldap builds, WSL2, uvx, config path resolution)
• docs/RELEASE.md release checklist (manual pre-tag steps; publishing itself is automated on tag)
• 8 release-critical routing cases in the eval dataset (SOS investigation, broken replication, slow directory, privacy/offline/archive mode queries) — gate in CI
• README restructured around the support-engineer path: uvx install from PyPI, four server modes table, "first questions to ask", tool groups, playbook links

Packaging & Distribution

• Proper installable package: src/ldap_assistant_mcp/ distribution package, hatchling build, ldap-assistant-mcp console script, tests excluded from the wheel
• Tag-triggered release workflow (release.yml): build → PyPI trusted publishing → MCP Registry publish
• CI: fast no-container job (ruff + non-live tests + build + clean-venv wheel smoke test) on a Python 3.11/3.12/3.13 matrix; Dependabot; live pytest marker
• Package version reported to MCP clients; server-level instructions shipped by default; stderr logging handler (LDAP_MCP_DEBUG for debug level)

Privacy

• IPv4/IPv6 address redaction in text sanitization (bare, bracketed, zone-indexed, and port-suffixed forms) with deterministic per-session [ip-…] tokens
• Startup WARNING when privacy mode is disabled (expose_sensitive_data=true)
• Fail-closed sanitization: unrecognized backend-result and finding-metadata keys are now redacted by default instead of passed through raw
• Fail-closed hardening extended to RUV data (including error text), attribute values outside the sensitive sets (identifier-shaped values tokenized, nested entry structures sanitized per-attribute), and finding top-level keys; text sanitization now also covers email addresses and modern TLDs (.xyz, .dev, .ai, country codes, …)

Configuration

• LDAP_IS_OFFLINE environment variable implemented (was documented but ignored): implies LDAP_IS_LOCAL=true, requires LDAP_SERVERID
• tls_verify config field + LDAP_TLS_VERIFY / LDAP_CONNECT_TIMEOUT environment variables (from 0.4.x hardening)

Changed

Contract honesty

• Unimplemented auth_method values (sasl_gssapi, sasl_digest_md5, sasl_external) are now rejected with a clear error instead of silently degrading to a simple bind with an empty password; LDAPI/SASL EXTERNAL is selected via use_ldapi
• Invalid LDAP_PORT / LDAP_AUTH_METHOD values fail startup with clear configuration errors instead of bare tracebacks
• A server with is_offline=true but missing is_local/serverid now gets a clear error instead of falling through to a live connection attempt
• The OpenLDAP provider (experimental, bypasses the privacy sanitizer) now requires an explicit LDAP_MCP_EXPERIMENTAL_OPENLDAP=true opt-in; LDAP_PROVIDER=openldap without it errors with guidance

Diagnostics correctness (0.4.x hardening series)

• Fixed silently-wrong results in find_unindexed_searches, disk/certificate health checks, backend lint discovery, SOS healthcheck parsing, log time_range filtering, and offline replication detection
• Archive robustness: decompression-bomb guard, extraction caching, DN-normalized compare_dse_configs, streamed JSON log parsing, bounded log memory

Fixed

• Config-load failures for an explicitly configured LDAP_SERVERS_CONFIG now fail loudly instead of silently booting an env-fallback phantom server
• Multiple privacy-mode leak paths closed (monitor connection data, credential hashes, mapping-tree suffixes, resource errors, traceback text)
• lib389 workarounds: DSEldif case-sensitive attribute lookup, DSEldif last-line drop, DirsrvAuditLog.parse_line crash, parse_timestamp precision loss