Timeouts, reconnection, asychronous operations

[Mike R. <mri...@dr...>]

I'm using perl-ldap for an Apache rewrite handler to provide mappings to 
Novell NetWare home directories that are mounted as shares on our Linux 
box.  This means I'm binding once when Apache is started and the script 
runs continually, with Apache passing things to the script to rewrite.

We're transitioning to Novell Cluster Services, and it's easy to point 
'ldap' to the cluster IP address, which will always be available on a 
cluster node.  However, if the IP address moves, my script will no 
longer work, as the LDAP connection no longer isn't known on the new 
server (the TCP connection tables do not move over when the cluster 
fails over).

Thus I need to have a mechanism for timing out a bad connection and 
rebinding in the event of a server failure.

This would also be useful in general for sites doing round-robin DNS of 
their ldap hostname, and resiliency in general.

I feel that binding asynchronously and polling for results is the way to 
go, but I've not seen an example of how to poll asynchronously in 
perl-ldap.  Has anyone done it?  Alternately, can anyone suggest a 
better way to detect a stale connection and attempt to rebind?

Thanks for your help.

--Mike