Re: TCP/IP string standard?

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 12:55 PM 11/23/99 +0100, you wrote:
>I have written a system that should handle incoming ldap strings (open,
>bind, search e.t.c.)
>and translate these into requests towards out (flat) Btrieve database.

Might be easier to just write a custom backend to an existing
LDAP server.

>The question is:
>What is the exact syntax for the TCP/IP strings for ldap clients (v3
>prefered)?

The exact syntax of LDAP is described by RFC 2251 (v3) and RFC 1777
(v2) (http://www.rfc-editor.org/).  The messages are encoded using
a subset of ASN.1 Basic Encoding Rules.  RSA provides a nice guide
to ASN.1, BER, and DER at:
  ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/ascii/layman.asc

>In what format are these incoming strings???

The octet steam is a series of BER sequences.

>I now threat them like
>ordinary 1 byte character strings.

They are octets, not characters.

>Does these ldap string correspond to the ldap-URL syntax format (so I
>can interpret them to real(?) requests)???

No.

>Where can I find the exact definition(s) about the TCP/IP translation,
>i.e. how one should receive tcp/ip-ldap strings from a ldap client and
>in what syntax the requests are in?

RFC2251/RFC1777 + ASN.1/BER/DER.

>Greatful for any help!
>PS! If any other developer are working with the same problem and would
>like to cooperate then please contact me. DS!

Very few developers work at the octet stream level when developing
applications using protocols based upon ASN.1.  There is very little
reason to reimplement BER/DER.

Kurt