Dealing with cert errors when using python-ldap

We are having some issues with our LDAP server dying. This is part of an IPA setup, and it seems slapd stops accepting connections after too many queries. To debug this, I constructed a Python script to repeatedly bind and unbind to the LDAP server. I used python-ldap to do this.

The example worked fine, but since I wanted to torture the SSL portion of our LDAP server (since that seemed to be the one dying), I wanted to use an ldaps schema. My first attempt quickly lead to:

ldap.SERVER_DOWN: {'info': 'error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed (self signed certificate in certificate chain)', 'desc': "Can't contact LDAP server"}

Doing a little googling pointed me to the OPT_X_TLS_CACERTFILE option. I found the ca.cert file used to sign our self-signed cert (mine was in /etc/ipa) and copied that to my local system. I then pointed python-ldap to it via:

ldap.set_option(ldap.OPT_X_TLS_CACERTFILE , '/path/to/saved.cert')

And I was up and running, connecting to my LDAP server via the ldaps schema.