[15307] in Athena Bugs
Re: Who are you? and Re: disappearing xterms
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Tue Jul 29 02:48:03 1997
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 02:48:02 -0400 (EDT)
To: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[3336] in testers"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
[ this is probably all irrelevent since nscd's documentation would have
you believe it's radically changed for 2.6 ]
| file early today. This can happen, roughly, if the user logs out with
| any xterms still open, and then logs in again within ten minutes.
...
|
| This happens essentially because Sun's nscd(1M) is doing caching on
| the password file; the getpwnam library call really talks to nscd. In
| the circumstances described above, nscd's cache becomes invalid for a
| time. xlogin calls getpwnam, which returns the user's password entry,
| _even though it is not actually in the password file_. xlogin
| therefore decides the user is local and it doesn't need to add to the
| password file. A later interaction (possibly one done by xterm) causes
| ncsd's cache to be corrected
Are you sure this is 10 minutes rather than 10 seconds? nscd(1M) claims:
Each
cache has a separate time-to-live for its data; modifying
the local database (/etc/hosts, and so forth) causes that
cache to become invalidated within ten seconds.
And this is consistent with the definition of 'check-files' in nscd.conf(4)
and the presence of 'check-files passwd yes' in our nscd.conf.
If something is happening with 10 minute periodicity, it sounds like
an OS bug. Presumably it should be reported to Sun...
--jhawk
ps: dumb unrelated release question; how come there's no
/afs/athena/system/sun4x_55/srvd symlink?
