Ruby LDAP --- Hooray!!

[gregarican]

After unsuccessfully trying to compile a Ruby LDAP implementation a
year or so ago I found another project on Rubyforge
(http://rubyforge.org/projects/net-ldap/) that easily accomplished the
task in my Windows One-Click Installer Ruby environment. It was as easy
as typing in ruby setup.rb! I am so thankful for the good work
performed by the project maintainer(s) and wanted to express this. Now
I can work on automating some spam filtering with my upstream mail
scanning host. And do so using Ruby rather than an alternative
language. Once again, thanks for the job well done!

 

[Francis Cianfrocca]

Thanks. Let us know here if you hit any problems with the library or
if you have any feature requests. Sounds like you may be doing more
with Net::LDAP than just bind-authenticating users, so I'll be curious
to follow your progress.

 

[gregarican]

For this one task all I am doing is pulling the Exchange Server global
address book through LDAP and uploading the derived list to an upstream
provider that helps us filter out spam e-mail messages. It's just a
quick pull and the library you have made things a snap. It's all done
now.

There was another project I was considering moving to LDAP. Right now I
have a mobile CRM app that uses Exchange CDO for storing the contact
details. Rather than use this (clunky) storage method I am thinking
about moving the contact store over to an lighter weight LDAP tree. I
have OpenLDAP Server on my development box and did some modeling of how
things would work. Seems like a good possibility down the road
sometime. Right now things work fine in regards to what's already been
done. It's just a fine tuning matter to improve things whenever I find
the time.

 

[Ola Bini]

Thanks. Let us know here if you hit any problems with the library or
if you have any feature requests. Sounds like you may be doing more
with Net::LDAP than just bind-authenticating users, so I'll be curious
to follow your progress.

I'm also using it, and it's really good. I'm actually specifically _not_
doing authentication with LDAP in Ruby (centralized CAS server), but I
am using LDAP as one of several data sources feeding a Rails
application. I must say that your overloading of & and | for combining
filters was most inspired. The only missing part is real prefix notation
for it, but I guess I can manage without. =)

Regards
--
Ola Bini (http://ola-bini.blogspot.com)
JvYAML, RbYAML, JRuby and Jatha contributor
System Developer, Karolinska Institutet (http://www.ki.se)
OLogix Consulting (http://www.ologix.com)

"Yields falsehood when quined" yields falsehood when quined.

 

[Francis Cianfrocca]

Out of curiosity, what kind of identities are you storing in Exchange
(and maybe LDAP someday) to support your mobile CRM? are they people
who work for your company? or people who are your company's
customers/vendors/partners?

(I ask because I'm thinking ahead about some business-oriented
enhancements to the LDAP library.)

 

[Francis Cianfrocca]

filters was most inspired. The only missing part is real prefix notation
for it, but I guess I can manage without. =)

Ola, if I understand you correctly, you're looking for standard RFC-2254
filter syntax. Things like (for example):
(&(objectclass=person)(mail=ola*))

If that's what you need, it's there now. Look in the Rdoc for
Net::LDAP::Filter#construct, which will accept a string like the above.
The reason we didn't support the standard filter syntax originally was
because IMHO it sucks and we wanted to give people a better
alternative. The recommended way to do filters in Net::LDAP is with the
original API, but we supported the standard filter-syntax because
several people requested it.

 

[Ola Bini]

Ola, if I understand you correctly, you're looking for standard RFC-2254
filter syntax. Things like (for example):
(&(objectclass=person)(mail=ola*))

If that's what you need, it's there now. Look in the Rdoc for
Net::LDAP::Filter#construct, which will accept a string like the above.
The reason we didn't support the standard filter syntax originally was
because IMHO it sucks and we wanted to give people a better
alternative. The recommended way to do filters in Net::LDAP is with the
original API, but we supported the standard filter-syntax because
several people requested it.

Haha, yes, I know it's there, but not as language syntax. That was the
neat part about the filter combinations, IMHO.

Regarding the standard LDAP filter syntax... well, I'm an avid Lisp
lover, so, me likes it quite much. =) Each to his own. But your version
is better from a Ruby perspective, of course.

--
Ola Bini (http://ola-bini.blogspot.com)
JvYAML, RbYAML, JRuby and Jatha contributor
System Developer, Karolinska Institutet (http://www.ki.se)
OLogix Consulting (http://www.ologix.com)

"Yields falsehood when quined" yields falsehood when quined.

 

[Francis Cianfrocca]

Haha, yes, I know it's there, but not as language syntax. That was the
neat part about the filter combinations, IMHO.

Now I get it. So perhaps something like:

AND (filter-branch-1, filter-branch-2)

rather than:

filter-branch-1 & filter-branch-2


Correct?