using openldap as a translation layer.

["S James S Stapleton" <stapleton.41@osu.edu>]

Can I use open-ldap as a translation layer for queries with a ldap client 
with minimal configuration potential?

Right now the client (which cannot be trivially modified), can use LDAP 
authentication, sort-of. What it does, is it takes your user name, and 
assignes it to the 'uid' attribute, and then tacks on whatever string is in 
the config to form a distinguished name. For example, if I used 'stapleton' 
as my username and the config had 'ou=People,dc=domain,dc=tld', it would 
query for 'uid=stapleton,ou=People,dc=dmain,dc=tld'. Unfortunately, people 
usernames are everything before the '@' sign in their email, and this is not 
their uid. The uid is a number, that is used nowhere else. The standard 
process that we use is to take their user name and perform an ldap query to 
get the uid from the email, and then use the uid to verify if the user is 
correct.

Example:
ldap://server:389/uid=441068,ou=People,dc=mydomain,dc=tld
pulls up my information

Now, if I want to get my uid, I'd do this:
ldap://server:389/ou=People,dc=mydomain,dc=tld?uid?sub?(mail=stapleton@mydomain.tld)


The client, as described cannot do that, if a user attempts to use what they 
expect their user name to be, it will send:
uid=stapleton,ou=People,dc=mydomain,dc=tld
or
uid=stapleton@mydomain.tld,ou=People,dc=mydomain,dc=tld


Neither of which will authenticate. Is there a way to make OpenLDAP provide 
a middle layer to handle this?

Thank you,
-Jim Stapleton