[Mono-list] LDAP Lookup w/ Binary Data

[Thomas Harning]

Short form of what I want to do:
  fetch LDAP URL containing binary data (ex: 
ldap://crl.chamb.disa.mil/cn=DoD%20Root%20CA%202%2cou=PKI%2cou=DoD%2co=U.S.%20Government%2cc=US?certificaterevocationlist;binary


I threw together something that works but is ugly using Novell's Ldap library and I can 
get the binary data as a blob w/ the API and coercing sbyte -> byte......

I realized that less work would get me the necessary data (potentially faster in Windows) 
using System.DirectoryServices....   However, at least in Mono, the data is only available 
as a string.

Is there any way to tell System.DirectoryServices that I want BinaryData, or has that been 
left out?  I'd rather not pull in Novell on a Windows box to tell it how to do LDAP.  If 
Windows 'does' return binary data as a byte array and Mono doesn't.... is there a 
foolproof way of getting the string into a byte array w/o loss (perhaps due to some chosen 
encoding method that is used in Novell's library underneath DirectoryServices)?

Are there any other methods out there around this madness?  Are there any 
truly-asynchronous/event-executing LDAP lookup tools available?  I know that Novell's is 
"async", but I think its pretty ugly to poll for an async impl in .Net.
-- 
Thomas Harning @ TrustBearer Labs (http://www.trustbearer.com)
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