Re: ldap cert retrieval and pem encoding

["Arne Jørgensen" <arne@arnested.dk>]

Ulf Stegemann <ulf@zeitform.de> writes:

> XEmacs 21.4 (patch 17) "Jumbo Shrimp" [Lucid] (i686-pc-linux, Mule), 
> No Gnus v0.4
>
> The ldap server I use stores s/mime certificates either in DER or in PEM
> format.  smime-ldap retrieves only DER encoded certificates correctly.  PEM
> encoded certificates are fetched, too, but the resulting tmp file/buffer does
> not contain the correct cert only something that looks like a cert.
>
> Can anyone confirm this behaviour or is it a local problem?

Was this with or without the patch i posted here some weeks ago?
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/60203>

I didn't think it would be possible to retrieve a certificate via LDAP
in XEmacs without this patch. On the other hand LDAP in Emacs/XEmacs
is weird, so ...

I've read somewhere that certificates published via LDAP _should_
always be in DER format. But your LDAP server is probably not the only
server out there delivering in PEM format so we should maybe support
this anyway.

Is there some way to identify that the certificate is in PEM format?

Could you try to issue a command line like:

ldapsearch -x -t -h LDAPSERVER -b SEARCHBASE "mail=your@address.com" "userCertificate"

and have a look at whether the userCertificate attribute is reported
as userCertificate or userCertificate;binary?

And look whether the retrieved certificate contains the PEM header and
footer? (-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----)

Kind regards,
-- 
Arne Jørgensen <http://arnested.dk/>