Does anyone use nscd?

[Lawrence Stewart]

On 10/05/11 02:20, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Does anyone actually use nscd?

Yes, particularly for caching LDAP data.

> I ask because when I cleaned up a slew of aliasing bugs a couple of
> years ago, I believe I may have introduced a bug; I got exactly two
> complaints, and neither of the complainants could be bothered to try the
> workaround I suggested and report back.

I haven't seen these bugs. There is a different bug we hit fairly 
regularly related to -ve caching. If the machine running nscd loses 
connectivity with the DNS server for a while and does a DNS lookup 
during that time, nscd will cache the -ve reply indefinitely for all 
users, which breaks all sorts of crap. Have to forcibly run "nscd -I 
all" to fix. I will find and fix this bug one day if noone beats me to it...

> Although the code quality is atrocious, nscd is actually a pretty good
> idea.  I suspect the reason why nobody uses it is that it's off by
> default and people simply don't know about it.  Besides nuking it, which
> would be a shame, we have a range of options, from "just fixing the bug
> so those who want to use it can" in one end to "finding someone willing
> to clean it up and maintain it and enable it by default" in the other.

I'd like to see it stay in base. Moving it (slowly) towards a point 
where we can turn it on by default would be cool.

Cheers,
Lawrence