Custom Password Based Authentication

Hi,

I'm in the process of creating a custom login module and I have a few questions:

1. Does anyone know the method to call or the exception to throw that will trigger the "change password" functionality of the portal? The idea is to force the user to change password on initial logon and we have not been able to do that with SUN One LDAP (Portal does not recognize the "change password on initial logon" flag of LDAP).

2. Since the custom logon module i'm creating will basically authenticate with the LDAP server, is there a way I can programatically get a handle on the LDAP connection used by EP (the one configured under System Administration -> UME)instead of creating one on my own?

Our current setup is EP authenticating against LDAP and the only reason I'm writing a custom login module is because we need to force the user to change password on initial logon.

Any help would be geratly appreciated!

Thanks,

Yves