Do you keep opening and closing connections to LDAP?

[Thomas Gagne <tgagne@ameritech.net>]

Or do you open one connection and keep reusing?

My application is a server handling requests from hundreds of clients.  Each
has their own username/password.  When my application starts up it connects to
the LDAP server and rebinds to check username/passwords (when sessions with
the server are created) and also queries the LDAP server to see of the user is
permitted to do the thing they're requesting.

What I discovered is some firewalls have a timeout for LDAP requests (20
seconds on the one I'm working with).  If more than 20 seconds elapse between
transactions my next LDAP connection hangs 'cause the firewall is *dropping*
the packets.  I've used netstat and both the server box and the LDAP box and
it shows both computer think there's a connection but the firewall has dropped
it.

So I'm thinking maybe what I'm doing is either non-idiomatic or wrong.

Comments?

--
.tom