LDAP Search for all attributes of a DN

I have tried these two Net::LDAP approaches, but $numEnt is zero in both cases:

$mesg = $ldap->search( base => $dn );
$numEnt = $mesg->count;

$mesg = $ldap->search ( base => $dn, scope => 'base',);
$numEnt = $mesg->count;

A command line ldapsearch like so works fine:

ldapsearch -h my_ldap_server -x -b "fully qualfied dn"