Hooray! A helpdesk solution!
Now, on to what I assume will be some FAQs (I was going to ask them, but then I answered them myself, so this post changed a bit)
Ideally, I'd prefer to set up a system with an authentication wall for our internal users, with selected users enabled as agents. Is this something that even makes sense out of the box with the LDAP integration?
Yes! In the admin panel, go to Manage > Plugins > LDAP Authentication and Lookup and check the "Enable authentication of clients" box. Same caveat on needing to manually register users applies (in this case from the agent panel), but that's not so bad! Slightly annoying is that the full process is a little unintuitive:
add the user (yay - autofill)
click the "Register" button on the created user page
Un-check the "Send account activation email" box
Set some sort of garbage password (a beefy one, just to be safe)
Check the "User cannot change password" box (again, just to be safe)
Click the "Create Account" button to actually activate the account
Can the "public" knowledge base be enabled for signed-in accounts only?
Also, yes, but again, unintuitively, you can only check the "Require Client Login" box while the "Registration Method" in the Users settings is "Public" allowing registration. Then, you can check the "Require Client Login" box, save changes, and go set user registration back to "Private" and the "Require Client Login" box stays checked, only allowing the Knowledge Base to appear for signed-in users, and protecting those pages with login being required.
