Accessing Portal LDAP with(out) UserManagement API

Hi,

i would like to check from a non-portal applikation the user-data and especially the password of the user in the EP5 Portal LDAP. What is the easiest way to check for the password?

I wonder when i use JNDI (sun) if i can check the password correctly since its encrypted in LDAP and i don't know how it's done (md5?, key?...).

Has anybody done anything similar? Did you do it by using the usermanagement API or simply via JNDI? If you maybe could add some sample code of how to check for the password i would be very glad.

thanks

stefan