Not sure this is the right place for this posting, but it might be helpful to post my findings somewhere.
It seems that Net::LDAP is not correctly using the loopback interface when being used to connect to an LDAP server on the same machine. This cases SElinux to think it is attempting to make an off-box connection. SELinux has restrictions on web applications doing this by default. I found this out attempting to install BugZilla on an SElinux enables RHEL 5 box. Symptom: When attemtping ot login BugZilla reports that the connection to the ldap server "ldap://localhost"; failed yet the server is running and other clients (even a test Perl script I wrote) works fine. The Net::LDAP->new call is simply failing and causing this. The solution is to enable off box connections using the setseboolean command. Other socket-based applications such as MySQL seem to work. I don't know if the problem in is the SElinux configuration, the underlying network library that it uses or Net::LDAP itself. I'm not a Perl guy. Anyway, this maybe this post will help someone else.
