UTF-8 support and other quirks in the LDAP backend (in 2.2.4).

[Fredrik Ohrn]

Hello!

We are currently migrating from using a smbpasswd file to LDAP.

One problem we uncovered is that the backend needs to convert all strings 
stored in LDAP to/from UTF-8. This mainly affects users real names which 
look quite borked if they contain non 7bit ASCII chars. Some LDAP servers 
will let you use any charset but OpenLDAP likes to enforce UTF-8 (also the 
LDAPv3 standard mandates it).

Binding to the LDAP server with v3 of the protocol would be nice, since v2 
is deprecated in OpenLDAP v2.1 (OK, so v2.1 isn't ready for prime time 
yet, but it's still nice to get it done).

Sane defaults need to be added for optional attributes, for example 
pwdMustChange ought to be never if it's not present in the users 
record.


My question is if anyone is actively working on the LDAP backend and if 
the above problems will be fixed soon. Else I will start working on it 
myself and submit some patches.


Regards,
Fredrik

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Fredrik Öhrn                               Chalmers University of Technology
ohrn at chl.chalmers.se                                                  Sweden