5.x, LDAP and caching uid/gid data

[Charles Swiger]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 1:53 PM, Ben Hockenhull wrote:
> There's no user information on the local system at all, so every  
> operation
> that requires UID/GID information had to do an LDAP lookup to get  
> UID/GID
> data.  So, for example, every piece of mail delivered means an LDAP  
> lookup.
> Ick.

You really want to leave the standard system UIDs and GIDs in place,  
and use LDAP (or NIS, etc) to augment them with the additional  
information about network-wide users and groups.

> Is there such a thing as nscd for FreeBSD, and if so, has anyone had
> experience using it?  I found a lookupd utility that looks  
> promising, but
> I'm leery of implementing it in production as it seems like fairly  
> untested
> software.

lookupd has been around for close to fifteen years, and has been used  
with large user/group databases (50,000+ users).  More to the point,  
the PADL stuff ought to play nicely with lookupd, since PADL came  
from the NEXTSTEP and now MacOS X community where lookupd originated.

I am not sure that lookupd has been used or tested or shaken down as  
much with FreeBSD, so the integration with PAM may not be as mature  
as it's usage with the nss_ mechanism.

However, if you really want nscd, I'd imagine that you ought to be  
able to hunt that down from Sun now that the source code for Solaris  
10 is openly available...?

-- 
-Chuck