Is it possible displaying ldap folder structure with Perl? - perl

Question

I will retrieve user informations from a LDAP server. Customer sent me following 3 data:
LDAP Server IP
Username to authenticate
Password to authenticate
This is the 1st time I am working with LDAP so I studied on it. I see that I must use some parameters like cn, dc, ou. Should not customer give this info either? Or customer's info is enough and can I find these parameters by a code displaying folder structure?

Answer 1

The structure you want to see is called the directory tree and is made of LDAP "entries" (not folders).
You should be able to collect entries from your directory provided that the credentials you've been given are sufficient. For that you need a client library, you can use Perl LDAP.
Using that library you would do something like :
use Net::LDAP;
# Init connection and bind to the directory.
$ldap = Net::LDAP->new('ldaphost.example.com') or die "$#";
$mesg = $ldap->bind ($binddn, password => $password);
# Perform a search on the whole tree below (and including) the base object.
$mesg = $ldap->search(base => $basedn);
# Handle error
$mesg->code && die $mesg->error;
# Display results
foreach $entry ($mesg->entries) { $entry->dump; }
$mesg = $ldap->unbind;
The code above just print entries to stdout ($entry->dump).
$binddn is the dn to authenticate with. If you've been given a simple username that is not a dn, like 'username' instead of something like uid=username,dc=example,dc=com, it would probably mean that you are dealing with Active Directory. In this case you can try to bind with a binddn that corresponds to the following pattern : 'username#example.com'.
basedn is the dn of the base object entry, the search is performed on the whole tree below (and including) the base object. You will have to specify a valid base dn.
You can try to guess which base dn to use. Domain components (dc) usually match the FQDN but it is not guaranteed it results in a valid base dn (e.g. 'ldaphost.example.com' would give 'dc=example,dc=com'). However you can query the server for rootDSE information and retrieve the namingContexts (or defaultNamingContext if any) and use one of them as the base dn :
$ldap->search(base => '', attrs => 'namingContexts');
That said, if you really want to display the directory tree, you have better to go with an LDAP explorer like Apache Directory Studio.
Note that LDAP is not limited to storing information in strict "tree" structures, it just have to respects a Directory Information Tree (DIT) nomenclature.