Hey there,
I am currently seeing intermittent issues with this gem; every once a while, our connection with ldap will drop and fail with this backtrace:
"/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:33:in getbyte'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ber/ber_parser.rb:169:inread_ber'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:178:in block in read'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/instrumentation.rb:19:ininstrument'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:177:in read'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:143:inqueued_read'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:253:in bind_simple'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:222:inblock in bind'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/instrumentation.rb:19:in instrument'", "/opt/shared/bundle/ruby/2.2.0/gems/net-ldap-0.11/lib/net/ldap/connection.rb:219:inbind'"

As far as I can tell, this works flawlessly most of the time since I have a couple of cron jobs that reuse the same piece of code over and over again and this only happens (very consistently) every week or may be a bit more frequently than that. The steps to reproduce this issue are literally attempting to bind. I am tempted to say perhaps that when the connection times out, either a nil object is returned to the calling function which then attempts to send it the ord command which then fails, but again, I haven't taken a look at the source code as of now.