Wanted to close this off on the LDAP authentication front. Enabled debug logging so I can get more details on catalina.out, I found that the ldap credentials for the user were working (auth successful) and it matches to an entry in mysql, but fails when trying to query ldap, and that's what Mike noted on the first reply. Nothing special about failures though as the log didn't even show what it failed on, just stops.
A colleague noted that you can add additional search fields that taylor to the users (active / full time users) and that helped narrow down the search so it was successful. The ldap user logged in and showed what's available via mysql database (permissions, connections etc) and now I'm good. now to tweak it further with groups/lock down and seeing how to automate user creation on mysql to correspond to ldap. Thanks all! -- Sent from: http://apache-guacamole-general-user-mailing-list.2363388.n4.nabble.com/
