Re: Active Directory DC and OU

[idsfa]

in reply to Active Directory DC and OU

<psychic>

You can query an active directory's LDAP entries using the perl modules Net::LDAP or Net::LDAP::Express.Example:

 use Net::LDAP;
 
 $ldap = Net::LDAP->new( 'pdc.foobar.com' ) or die "$@";
 
 $mesg = $ldap->bind ;    # an anonymous bind
 
 $mesg = $ldap->search( # perform a search
                        base   => "c=US",
                        filter => "(&(cn=Some Loser))"
                      );
 
 $mesg->code && die $mesg->error;
 
 foreach $entry ($mesg->entries) { $entry->dump; }
 
 $mesg = $ldap->unbind;   # take down session

</psychic>

[strat]

If you just want to query ActiveDirectory, Net::LDAP is fine. But for writing, AD seems to have a problem with non-ASCII characters because (except within the distinguishedName) utf-8 is not used and Net::LDAP in version3 insists on writing utf-8.

• either use Encode to iso-8859-1 and use Net::LDAP version2, e.g.

  my $ldap = Net::LDAP->new($hostname,
                            version => 2)
    or die "Error: can't connect to '$hostname'";
  

• or Win32::AD::User which is good for adding and editing users but doesn't support searches
• or use pure Win32::OLE (that's the way I prefer). Argel postet some very good links below.