Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
A new release of Net::LDAPapi module is now available for Perl via CPAN. This release includes compilation against OpenLDAP libraries from version 2.1 forward. It now supports LDAPv3, including SASL binds.
Great, glad to see this finally making it back out to the world.
Support for the Netscape (now Mozilla) C SDK has been kept, but not tested. I welcome feedback on the usability with the Mozilla C SDK.
Many thanks to Howard Chu and Symas Corporation for the work done to realize LDAPv3 support with Net::LDAPapi.
Net::LDAPapi can be obtained from:
http://search.cpan.org/~mishikal/Net-LDAPapi-2.00/
For those who have never used Net::LDAPapi, it uses the C interface for its LDAP operations. This means that it is much faster than the pure perl Net::LDAP module from the perl-ldap package. However, it also relies on having the C libraries it was linked against available.
We've observed a 100:1 speed difference between Net::LDAPapi and Net::LDAP. Usually people writing perl scripts don't seem to take performance or efficiency into account, because they're just coding up a "quickie tool." But it then evolves into something else, and eventually gets deployed into production. We've seen this happen over and over with perl-based web login scripts, where gradually the web server gets bogged down under its authentication load. Switching from Net::LDAP to Net::LDAPapi has helped a number of our customers get their systems back up on their feet.