init, open, and close

[Michael Rothwell <rothwell@holly-springs.nc.us>]

I'm writing a Gnome panel applet to do address-book (mainly phone
extensions) lookups from an Exchange server using LDAP. The problem I'm
having is with closed connections. Is there a way to tell if a
connection returned from ldap_init() and/or ldap_open is now invalid? If
I re-run ldap_init() on each request, it works, but piles up open
connections. If I don't, with inactivity (over lunch, say), then the
connection times out.

How do I close a connection?
How do I test a connection?

Protocol and other errors seem to cause segfaults. Should I catch
SIGSEGV? Or is there a better way? For instance, ldap_search_s()
segfaults far too often when talking to Exchange.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I've searched the archives, faqs,
etc. and not found good answers...

-M