Beginning Summer semester, my workplace will switch one of its email systems from fairly basic sendmail to one using the Sun ONE Messaging Server. I'm fairly certain that this means I'll be needing heavy duty Perl access to the Sun ONE Directory Server.

The problem is that several of the CPAN LDAP modules are based on/require Net::LDAP, which is designed for use with OpenLDAP (unfortunately not an option). That pretty much leaves me with perldap-1.4. Has anyone had any experience using it? Is it compatible with the Sun ONE Directory Server? I am somewhat leary of it since I had to edit its API.c program and define two variables that it was using (na and one I don't recall but set to NULL). Needless to say, I feel less than enthusiastic about using it.

Previously we were using OpenLDAP and I used Perl sans LDAP modules to create ldif update files. The schema we were using was very sparse but the ldif files took what seemed to me an inordinate amount of time to run (even though we stopped slapd during runtime). Once we have some test data loaded into the new Sun ONE schema I'll run some ldif updates against it to see if it is any faster.

BTW, I called Sun and they say that they don't have any recommendations or support for Perl interfaces to their directory server. Their resource kit/tools/SDK has some utility Perl scripts but is primarily java, c based.

We're still in the planning stages, so before I start any PM input would be appreciated.

--Jim