Re: how to handle connection to server if server runs away?

[Graham B. <gb...@po...>]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 01:21:47PM +0100, John Berthels wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Graham Barr wrote:
> 
> > > I can't think of a simple and portable way to do this in LDAPv2.
> > 
> > You mean instead of deliberatly sending a malformed packet and expecting
> > an error response. But thats probbaly too evil :)
> 
> Heh. I didn't have the gall to suggest that.
> 
> You could do something like issue a hopefully-low-impact search request.
> (scope=single entry, pick a base, have an explicit filter
> (cn=hopedoesntexist), ask for only 'cn' attribute back). But it still
> feels icky.

I suppose the question is "what is the result of ping supposed to mean"

If it just means the tcp connection is still alive then we can do anything.
But I suspect people want it to look at the result code to determine if
the server has decided to refuse to process requests or something.

> On the issue of 'layers over Net::LDAP', I must have missed the "we don't
> want sizelimit etc. management". Is there a real desire for a more
> 'cooked' API? (I quite like the current one...). Things like
> $ldap->exists( $dn ) might be nice though.
> 
> Whether that API lived in the Net::LDAP namespace/bundle or elsewhere
> shouldn't be relevant to what it could do - what do people want? Do we
> want a Net::LDAP::Cooked or Net::LDAPCooked module? If so what kind of
> features would people want?

I am happy with the idea, but yes the question of where does arise. Although
do they have to be methods ? We could just add functions to ::Util that accept
$ldap as the first argument. But I suspect people will want a sub-class.

Alternatively they could be added to Net::LDAP and would could AUTOLOAD them.
But then we really need to ask the question "what do they return?" If in the
exists example it returns a boolean, then it is limited to being used in a
sync mode.

Although I am sure we could do something with ::Message to allow hooks to
analyse results.

I would certainly invite discussion on the subject of adding extensions to Net::LDAP


Graham.

> jb
> 
> 
>