LDAP connections not being closed

Question

Hi,
I am trying to authenticate against a Netscape LDAP server and it works fine for 2 out of the 3 cases I am testing against.
The first case is authenticating with the correct username and correct password. In this case the user is authenticated and the connection is closed.
In the second case, I try to authenticate with the correct username and a wrong password. The authentication fails and an AuthenticationException is thrown. The connection is closed.
In the third case, where I have the PROBLEM is if I provide a wrong username, AuthenticationException is thrown indicating that such an username does not exist. But the CONNECTION IS NOT CLOSED.
Following is the code :
     private boolean authenticate(String userName, String password) throws Exception {
          Hashtable env = new Hashtable(11);
          env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, "com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory");
          env.put("com.sun.jndi.ldap.connect.pool", "false");
          env.put(Context.SECURITY_AUTHENTICATION, "simple");
          env.put(Context.SECURITY_PROTOCOL, "ssl");
          env.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, getSecurityPrincipal(userName));
          env.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, password);
          env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL,"ldap://ldap05.nike.com:11003");
          DirContext ctx = null;
          try {
               // Create initial context
               ctx = new InitialDirContext(env);
               return true;
          } catch (AuthenticationException e) {
               log.error(e.getMessage());
          } catch (NamingException e) {
               log.error("The user could not be validated on LDAP server due to :" + e.getMessage());
          } finally {
               if (ctx != null) {
                    ctx.close();
          return false;
     }Any help is appreciated.
Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

I did run the NETSTAT command and found some interesting things.
I ran it for the three cases. The first case is running netstat immediately after authenticating the user with VALID credentials. The status of the connection is TIME_WAIT which is the desired behaviour.
In the second case, when trying to authenticate with CORRECT username but a wrong password, an AuthenticationException is thrown. When I run the netstat command, the connection is in TIME_WAIT state which is the desired one.
In the third case, when I provide a wrong username, an AuthenticationException is thrown. When I run the netstat command, the connection is in ESTABLISHED state, which it should not be in.
An authenticationException is thrown for wrong username and also for wrong password. But the connection is closed for wrong password, but not for wrong username.This is what seems to me as a weird behaviour.
I was under the impression that in the CODE I mentioned at the begining of this topic, the INITIALDIRCONTEXT had the responsibility of closing the connection when authentication fails as we don't have a handle to close it. It is doing so in the case of ERROR 49 which is wrong password, but not in the case of ERROR 32 which is wrong username. Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it seem to be a bug with the INITIALDIRCONTEXT class.
Thanks.