5.x, LDAP and caching uid/gid data

[Tony Shadwick]

On Wed, 8 Jun 2005, Charles Swiger wrote:

> 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

What about caching, as he asked originally?  If a laptop user "walks 
away" from the network where the LDAP or NIS server is located, will it 
cache auth info so the user can still get in?