Re: [Fwd] perl-ldap on OS/390 ?!

[R. R. <ren...@cp...>]

Chris Ridd wrote:

> >> So basically everything that you pass into Net::LDAP objects *must* be
> >> ASCII or UTF-8 (if you are using LDAPv3.)
> > I know that. The question is, _where_ excatly do I need to convert (back
> > and forth) ?
> 
> I think I said - every value you pass into Net::LDAP from your program and
> every value you get out again. Since Net::LDAP doesn't mess around with
> values at all, the bytes you pass in should ultimately end up 'on the wire'.
Ah... sorry for my "ignorance".

So - when I understand you correctly - all I have to do is to pass
EBCDIC converted strings to every Net::LDAP subroutine (like bind,
search etc.) instead of their ASCII counterparts... correct ?

And the way back is to convert to EBCDIC as soon as I want to _work_
with the results on the 390 system. also correct ?

> >> I really don't know anything at all about perl on the 390, so this might
> >> be a stupid question: what character set is used in the variables in your
> >> program?
> > It's EBCDIC, which (in more "standardized" form) is "IBM-1047" (as
> > opposed to "ISO8859-1", which is ASCII).
> 
> ISO 8859-1 is not ASCII. There is an overlap, but ASCII is only a 7-bit
> character set and Latin-1 defines 8-bit characters.
Ok.
 
> But I guess your ISO 8859-1 converter will convert ASCII values correctly,
> since ISO 8859-1 is mostly a superset of ASCII.
I think so as well.
 
> >From your original message to Graham:
> >  1: #!/usr/local/bin/perl
> >  2: use Net::LDAP;
> >  3: $ldap = Net::LDAP->new('ldapsrv.ourdomain.com') or die "$@";
> 
> Add debug => 12 after the hostname to get protocol debugging. This may help
> us a lot. Maybe debug => 3 is more useful, as it gives us plain hex.
Will do that ! Thanks for the tip...
 
> >  4: $ldap->bind(dn       => 'cn=Directory Manager, o=OurCustomer',
> 
> That dn will need to be converted into ASCII.
Yep, I think I understand now...
 
> >  5:             password => 'xxxxxxxx');
> 
> That's tricky. The password syntax is OCTET STRING, which means 'just the
> bytes, no character set is implied' so whatever the directory server thinks
> the bytes are is needed here.
Hmmmm... I should perhaps try an anonymous bind at first.
 
> >  6: $mesg = $ldap->search(base   => "o=OurCustomer",
> 
> That search base needs changing to ASCII.
> >  7:                       filter => "(uid=*)");
> 
> That filter needs changing to ASCII.
> 
> >  8: $ldap->unbind;
> >  9: $mesg->code && die $mesg->error;
> > 10: foreach $entry ($mesg->all_entries) { $entry->dump; }
> 
> For testing, the dump() method's OK but for real use you'll need to convert
> all the values you get back from ASCII into EBCDIC.
Yes, of course !
 
> I'm guessing that you will want to use umlauts etc in your directory, in
> which case I would strongly recommend using LDAPv3 if possible - you need
> to explicitly request this in the bind operation - as then all values are
> UTF-8.
> 
> You should do that because many LDAP servers handle character sets wrongly
> (more importantly, differently) when using LDAPv2, so your code will then
> not depend on the possibly non-standard behaviour of a particular LDAP
> server.
> 
> (So whereever I said ASCII above, I mean UTF-8.)
Ok, thanks for all the infos !

I'll keep you informed...

Regards,

Rene
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