All,

 I have a custom Membership Provider that is authenticating against an OpenLDAP server.  This works perfectly fine in development, but once I push this to our development servers, it doesn't work.  I keep getting the error:

 System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x8007203A): The server is not operational.

Here's my code:

Fixed it.  Luckily I found this article that explains the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols namespace.  Unfortunately there was a problem with the certificate issuer name and therefore my task kept failing. 

The code that fixed it is below.  The main item was the VerifyServerCertificate portion where I could override the issue of having different names on the certificate issuer and the server I was connecting to.  That method is at the bottom of the listing:

Dim ldi As LdapDirectoryIdentifier = New LdapDirectoryIdentifier(ldap-1.areaname.com)
        Dim myUserName As String = String.Format("uid={0},ou=People,dc=areaname,dc=com", username)
        Dim creds As System.Net.NetworkCredential = New System.Net.NetworkCredential(myUserName, password)
        Dim conn As LdapConnection = New LdapConnection(ldi, creds)
        Dim response As SearchResponse = Nothing
        Dim anEntry As SearchResultEntry = Nothing
        Dim isUserFound As Boolean = False

        conn.SessionOptions.ProtocolVersion = 3
        conn.SessionOptions.SecureSocketLayer = True
        conn.AuthType = AuthType.Basic
        conn.SessionOptions.VerifyServerCertificate = New VerifyServerCertificateCallback(AddressOf ServerCertificateRoutine)
        Dim filter As String = String.Format("uid={0}", username)

        Dim aRequest As SearchRequest = New SearchRequest("OU=People,DC=areaname,DC=com", filter, SearchScope.Subtree)

        Try
            conn.Bind()
            response = conn.SendRequest(aRequest)
            anEntry = response.Entries(0)
            If anEntry.Attributes.Count > 0 Then
                isUserFound = True
            Else
                isUserFound = False
            End If
        Catch ldapEx As LdapException
            'this is thrown when the connection fails
            isUserFound = False
        Catch ex As Exception
            isUserFound = False
            Dim rethrow As Boolean = ExceptionPolicy.HandleException(ex, "General")
            If rethrow Then
                Throw
            End If
        End Try

        Return isUserFound

 Private Shared Function ServerCertificateRoutine(ByVal conn As LdapConnection, ByVal cert As X509Certificate)
        'This ignores any errors from the certificate
        Return True
    End Function

 Hope this helps others who have hit this.

Matt