UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

We have an application that uses Active directory to authenticate the users. the admins of the app. were complaining because the windows domain controller they are going against is not very stable. I wrote a shell script using ldapsearch to look up a user against the domain controller their app uses, and if it can't complete the lookup it pages them that LDAP may be down. here is the command i am using:
ldapsearch -h 10.168.170.100 -b "dc=nslijhs,dc=net" -D svc-bdvr -w 5703ibm '(Cn=svc-psft)'

this works fine, my question is what is the default time limit it waits for the search to complete before coming back it can't do the lookup. I am not using the -l switch which is supposed to specify how long it waits. when I searched the web for ldapsearch it shows that switch and explains it, but never says if it is not part of the command how long it actually waits.

i'm guessing from your efforts and from the fact that there is no reference to
this in the man page for ldapsearch . . .. that the default is.... "until there's a response".

the -l option was implemented explicitly to deal with the situation you have.

Yeah, i think you are right. I am now playing around with the -l to tune the script more. thanks.