Hello, I am having trouble with updating the thumbnailPhoto Active Directory attribute using the ADSI interface through Win32::OLE

I have been able to add photos using an Active Directory Users and Computers extension to individual user accounts, but I would like to have a way of doing 'bulk' imports. And of course my language of choice is perl for doing this.

The thumbnailPhoto attribute is an 'octet string' and I don't believe I've tried to manipulate this type of attribute before, though, I have retrieved values from them without any problems.

First off, I thought I would try and export images that had been previously imported:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE qw[in];

my $adspath = shift || die "Provide an adspath already\n";

{
  warn $adspath, "\n";
  my $user = Win32::OLE->GetObject("LDAP://$adspath");
  die "Oh dear\n" unless $user;
  $user->GetInfo;
  unless ( defined $user->{thumbnailPhoto} ) {
     warn "No thumbnail\n";
     exit 0;
  }
  my $thumb = $user->{thumbnailPhoto};
  {
    open my $piccy, '>:raw', 'piccy.jpg' or die "$!\n";
    print $piccy $thumb;
  }
}
exit 0;
[download]

This works fine to retrieve a 'piccy' and I had a JPEG file I could open and admire.

Buoyed up by the success of this, I tried this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp;
use Win32::OLE qw[in];

my $adspath = shift || die "Provide an adspath already\n";

my $filename = shift || die "No filename provided\n";
my $content = read_file( $filename, binmode => ':raw' );

{
  warn $adspath, "\n";
  my $user = Win32::OLE->GetObject("LDAP://$adspath");
  die "Oh dear\n" unless $user;
  $user->GetInfo;
  $user->Put('thumbnailPhoto',$content);
  $user->SetInfo;
}
exit 0;
[download]

This ends up with 'ÿØÿà' in the attribute.

I tried various things, including:

• Win32::OLE::Variant - Variant( VT_ARRAY|VT_UI1, $content )
• pack and unpack
• Sacrificial slaughter

The above seemed to either have no effect (Variant) or put garbage in the attribute

I found VBScript code that seemed to use a byte array to assign to the attribute:

Function ReadBinaryFile(FileName)
Const adTypeBinary = 1
Dim BinaryStream
Set BinaryStream = CreateObject("ADODB.Stream")
BinaryStream.Type = adTypeBinary
BinaryStream.Open
BinaryStream.LoadFromFile FileName
ReadBinaryFile = BinaryStream.Read
End Function

Set objNewUser = GetObject("LDAP://cn=some,ou=adspath,dc=domain,dc=loc
+al")
objNewUser.GetInfo
objNewUser.Put "thumbnailPhoto", ReadBinaryFile("image.jpg")
objNewUser.SetInfo
[download]

I have an idea what a byte array is, but not how to coerce one from the contents of a Perl scalar. So I am stuck and would be grateful of any advice.

Many thanks in advance.