I’ll be the first to admit that our org has a weird AD system, but the only real way to do user searches is with the global catalog, which allows and uses an empty search base.
The current web UI doesn’t allow for empty search bases. In some other applications with less rigorous checks (looking at you graylog)we can just edit the setting page HTML or change the backing setting store, but it looks like Rancher is a bit smarter about user input (hooray!) and I’m not sure how to go about modifying the etcd storage.
Allowing an empty search base would really help with some stranger environments.