From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-02-04T04:27:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Active Directory

On 2/2/06, Vince Puzzella <vpuz@rogers.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if anybody had done any work with MS Active Directory.  I
> need to do basic stuff like searching for users objects by attribute, and
> creating and updating user objects.
>
> I've come across Ruby/LDAP and was wondering if anyone has used it.  If so,
> what are your experiences and would you recommend it?  If not, what are the
> alternatives.
>

Ruby/LDAP (and ActiveLDAP, which is written on top of it) are both
quite nice, and support Active Directory.
Unfortunately, Ruby/LDAP is a C extension, and currently doesn't
compile on Windows.  I'm hoping to either have time to look at that
myself, or hire somebody to do it for me, in the near future. 
Ultimately, I'd like to see a pure Ruby LDAP library (like Perl has a
pure Perl library.), rather than one that depends on external
libraries and other complexities.  I'm currently too much of an LDAP
novice to promise such a thing, though.

If you want to talk to Active Directory from a Linux, BSD, etc, etc,
system, that works right now.  Doing it from Windows requires some
contortions.