Cron stops working when using nss_ldap (sort of)

[Serge de Souza]

Ray Van Dolson wrote:
> This is an odd one... I have several FC1 based servers which are making use of
> nss_ldap and pam_ldap for user logins and user information.  Everything works
> great except mysteriously some cron jobs don't seem to run and none will email
> their output to root... UNTIL .. I disable LDAP.
> 
> After tinkering with this some (lots of trial and error) the cron emails work
> perfectly until "ldap" is added to the "groups" line in /etc/nsswitch.conf.
> 
> passwd, shadow and netgroups can all have "ldap" prsent and cron will work
> just fine, but as soon as you add ldap to the groups line, no more cron emails
> go out.
> 
> If I start up cron without "ldap" in the groups line it works fine and I can
> then add ldap to groups so I get my groups info.  As long as I don't restart
> crond it will continue working... this is the state I'm in right now, but
> obviously I want to get it working 100% the way it should be.
> 
> The jobs in /etc/crontab are running as root, and I see whenever they run
> that a request is made to my LDAP server looking for a user and group of
> root.  Obviously I don't have a root user defined on my LDAP server, but
> could this be the cause of the problem?
> 
> Anyone seen this sort of thing before?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ray

Is there anything in the logs ? Is nscd running ?

I have :

services:   files ldap
netgroup:   files ldap
protocols:  files ldap
automount:  files ldap
shadow:     files ldap


I had trouble with cron and ldap, in that the cron jobs were not running 
. We fixed it by removing caching of the passwd in nscd.conf. But this 
does not seem to be the same problem as you.

Serge