🚀 go-pugleaf

Nick Holloway wrote:
> 
> richard@r-senior.demon.co.uk (Richard Senior) writes:
> > For most applications and utilities I expect this is just a simple lookup
> > in /etc/passwd using the getpwent system call. Did you take off world read
> > permissions on /etc/passwd?
> 
> At least SuSE and Redhat appear to use nscd (Name Service Cache Daemon)
> by default, and so lookups go via this daemon.  This makes it a little
> more complicated to diagnose.

You had me worried there for a minute, I thought I might have an nscd on
my new RH7 system and I havn't done anything about reconfiguring it to
sanity. But it does not appear. And there is no sign of unwanted dialups
caused by this box[1], which is the biggest problem with nscd IMO. SuSE
does indeed seem to use it by default. Solaris is also guilty. I don't
know about MDK.

> 
> I've seen problems with this daemon where lookups get cached far too
> long (positive and negative), so newly created users do not show up,
> or changes to the DNS are not seen.

This, and the problem with dialups caused by nscd looking up names in
its cache to refresh them in case someone wants them again. Nscd fails
to recognise that DNS has its own caching mechanism and doesn't need
this sort of "help". IMHO if running nscd it should be disabled for DNS.
Nscd might be useful in the sort of large NIS+ networks it seems to have
been designed for but I don't consider it to be of much use otherwise. I
regard it as a bad thing[TM].

Does the OP run NIS? This could also be a symptom of a broken
passwd.byuid map.

Regards, Ian

[1] Not really a box I suppose, as it's a VMWare virtual machine.