How to get the socket to listen for replies from referral connections?

[Ian Puleston <ipuleston@SonicWALL.com>]

Hi,

Some time back I implemented an OpenLDAP-based LDAP client in a network appliance that uses code based on the tools for LDAP searches etc. I used the tool code because it gave me a nice easy LDIF-based API, but the downside was that each search operation was totally synchronous, so I'm now working on updating it to support asynchronous searches.

I have a daemon task that listens for replies from the server after a request is set, and that then calls ldap_result, ldap_parse_result, etc. - basically all the things that ldap_do_search does synchronously. The daemon task, being ouside of OpenLDAP, gets the socket to listen on for each request via ldap_get_option with LDAP_OPT_SOCKBUF. This is working well.

The problem is when new connections are opened when a referral/reference is followed. In this case the daemon needs to listen for replies on these too, but there is no way that I can see to get at its socket from outside the OpenLDAP core.
LDAP_OPT_SOCKBUF gets the socket for the primary connection and there is no equivalent mechanism to get the sockets for the referral connections.

What I've had to do is to add a new LDAP_OPT_REF_SOCKBUFS in my local OpenLDAP code to return a list of the socket buffers for additional connections opened for referrals.

I am using an oldish version - 2.3.32 so:

- am I missing any alternate way to get these sockets to listen on?

- has anything been added in more recent versions that will help with this?

- if not would this new option LDAP_OPT_REF_SOCKBUFS be a useful addition? If so I could submit it via the bug reporting.

Ian