status of nsswitch.conf in current?

Richard Coleman richardcoleman at mindspring.com
Fri Aug 22 14:29:36 PDT 2003


> Having additional examples in /usr/share/examples/etc
> would also be nice.  (Ideally, with a comment in
> /etc/nsswitch.conf.example pointing to those additional
> examples.)

At the very least, a copy of the default nsswitch.conf should be in the 
examples directory.    Since I didn't find an example there, I figured 
the facility was either not fully implemented yet, or broken (otherwise 
an example would be there).  That's the reason I asked on the list in 
the first place.  Since I'm pretty experienced with FreeBSD and it 
confused me, you can be sure it will confuse others.

> I do find Ruslan's logic here a bit peculiar, though.  Having
> an nsswitch.conf with the default settings should only
> "slow things down" by the time needed to parse the file.
> Well-written parsers are very fast.

I also feel that the logic that this will "slow things down" is a red 
herring.  For many of the common cases (i.e. host name resolution by a 
remote DNS server) the amount of time to parse the nsswitch.conf will be 
minuscule relative to the amount of time necessary for to perform the 
lookup.

I would love to know how much overhead parsing the nsswitch.conf adds to 
a local password lookup.

Richard Coleman
richardcoleman at mindspring.com




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