Cleaned up the layout quite a bit to make Gemifying and including into Rails 3 less painful. Some steps to 1.9 compatibility

lib/net/ldap/core_ext/bignum.rb

@@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+module Net
+  class LDAP
+    module Extensions
+      module Bignum
+
+        def to_ber
+          #i = [self].pack('w')
+          #i.length > 126 and raise Net::BER::BerError.new( "range error in bignum" )
+          #[2, i.length].pack("CC") + i
+
+          # Ruby represents Bignums as two's-complement numbers so we may actually be
+          # good as far as representing negatives goes.
+          # I'm sure this implementation can be improved performance-wise if necessary.
+          # Ruby's Bignum#size returns the number of bytes in the internal representation
+          # of the number, but it can and will include leading zero bytes on at least
+          # some implementations. Evidently Ruby stores these as sets of quadbytes.
+          # It's not illegal in BER to encode all of the leading zeroes but let's strip
+          # them out anyway.
+          #
+          sz = self.size
+          out = "\000" * sz
+          (sz*8).times {|bit|
+      	if self[bit] == 1
+      	    out[bit/8] += (1 << (bit % 8))
+      	end
+          }
+
+          while out.length > 1 and out[-1] == 0
+      	out.slice!(-1,1)
+          end
+
+          [2, out.length].pack("CC") + out.reverse
+        end
+
+      end
+    end
+  end
+end