[KLUG Members] FC1 LDAP/Cron revisited

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2005-11-23 at 13:07 -0900, Adam bultman wrote:
> So, on Monday, I swapped out the 'current' version of nss_ldap on the
> fedora core 1 server ( which was 207) with a newer version from padl.com
> - 244.
> After upgrading the RPM (built from the source), there was no difference
> between the functioning of cron before the upgrade, and after. 

Ugh, then my next guess is a glibc bug in the NSS module loader - which
is pretty much terminal for the installation.

> If  you edited the crontab of an ldap-only user, cron would die one
> minute after you finished editing the crontab. AFter restarting, it
> would be fine.  Crontabs for users in /etc/passwd worked fine, with no
> crashes after editing crontabs.
> So, what else could be at fault here?  I rolled back the install of
> nss_ldap (since it did exactly nothing), and I'm currently trying to
> look for other possible causes. If you have any ideas, let me know...

Since the condition is easily reproduced have you tried stracing it?
Attach to the cron daemon with "strace -p {daemon pid}
-o /tmp/crond.strace.txt" and then edit the crontab of an LDAP user in
another session.  See what the last thing crond tried to do was.  And,
of course, do this with nscd NOT running - if you have nscd running you
should stop nscd and RESTART the crond daemon, before attempting the
trace;  otherwise if crond has already loaded nss_ldap.so and initially
detected the presence of nscd you might get residual effects.