[Novalug] thunderbird and ldap

Mark Smith mark@winksmith.com
Mon Jul 7 06:03:14 EDT 2014


yeah, me too.

nsswitch.conf is nothing unusual:

	passwd: files ldap
	group: files ldap
	shadow: files ldap

that was setup by an ldap installation.  the user in question isn't in
the passwd file so it should fall back to ldap.  i could see thunderbird
opening /etc/passwd and reading it though.  i suppose it's reasonable
to open /etc/passwd first, but it should not be crashing after that.
i can't see what it's doing with an strace though.

i didn't look at the source code, but clearly using the caching server
nscd makes it not crash as per this bug report.

	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=292127

it's a bit long in tooth, but i guess it doesn't happen often?


On Mon, Jul 07, 2014 at 02:10:51AM -0400, James Ewing Cottrell III wrote:
> I'm somewhat surprised. I'd think any application would simply do 
> getpwent and let /etc/nsswitch.conf determine which information to 
> query. Or...maybe it did. What does nsswict.conf say?
> 
> JIM
> 
> On 7/6/2014 10:28 PM, Mark Smith wrote:
> > just found out an interesting thing about a network that i just configured
> > for ldap usage.  thunderbird was starting, but failing to run, finally
> > ending in a core dump.  i could see it was cloning itself, but the clone
> > then died for some unknown reason.  my only clue was that i could see it
> > looking through /etc/passwd for the current user.  there was no current
> > user in /etc/passwd though.  this system was setup to use openldap.
> >
> > i did a bit of googling and discovered that thunderbird doesn't play
> > well with systems configured with ldap.  this was from a bug opened like
> > 7 years ago!  a bit more research and i discovered that just installing
> > nscd (which i wanted to do any way) solved that problem.
> >
> > again, nscd was even easier to setup than openldap:
> >
> > 	apt-get install nscd
> >
> > done.
> >
> > so, i have ldap caching now that I wanted anyway and thunderbird is no
> > longer core dumping.

-- 
Hei konā mai
Mark Smith
mark@winksmith.com



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