Windows and multiple client connections

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

This may be common knowledge already, but it surprised us. On Windows the
libldap calls WSAStartup on every new LDAP session, and WSACleanup on every
ldap_unbind. Unfortunately, after WSACleanup does its thing, a subsequent
WSAStartup is insufficient to resume socket operations. It appears that
WSACleanup does a very thorough (and irreversible) job of deallocating
socket resources...

This problem hasn't surfaced in the standard tools because they generally
set up only one session per invocation. We've been developing a longer-lived
client that performs a series of bind/search/unbind operations, and only the
first sequence would work. There's a simple workaround though - simply issue
an explicit WSAStartup call in our client. WSACleanup must be called as many
times as WSAStartup, and it only actually cleans up on the last call. A more
ideal solution would be for libldap to only call WSAStartup once, e.g. in
ldap_int_initialize, but then we'd need to register an exit handler (using
atexit or something similar) to perform the mandatory WSACleanup when a
program finishes.

I wonder if this behavior needs to be noted on the FAQ... ?

  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
  http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc