Connecting to LDAP Server from .NET

Question

I\'ve been recommended to use System.DirectoryServices.Protocols to be able to support connecting to LDAP servers other than Active Directoy here.
Unfortu

Answer 1

I suspect the main problem might be: samAccountName is a strictly Windows-only attribute that other LDAP servers won't know about.

So if you're going against a non-Active Directory LDAP, you should use something else for searching - e.g. sn (for surname or last name), givenName (first name), possibly displayName.

Another interesting option might be to use ANR (ambiguous name resolution) searches - see this page on SelfADSI roughly in the middle, where ANR is explained.

With ANR, you would write your query like this:

string ldapSearchFilter = 
   string.Format("(&(ObjectCategory={0})(anr={1}))", "person", username);

I also changed ObjectClass to ObjectCategory for two reasons:

• ObjectCategory is single-valued, e.g. only contains a single value (ObjectClass is multi-valued)
• ObjectCategory is typically indexed, and thus searches are typically a lot faster using ObjectCategory

Does this return the results you're looking for?