This is probably not a PAM issue, but is slightly reminiscent of a problem we saw with a Linux farm hammering two NIS servers: getpwuid(getuid()) was returning NULL randomly. It turned out that the non-Linux NIS servers had insufficient filehandles to serve all of the NIS requests that the busy farm was generating. (The problem scaled as the number of clients multiplied by their load, and not as the number of users or groups etc.) The most effective solution was to stop using NIS. Since your server is a Linux box, if you are short on ideas you might try echoing bigger numbers into the files in /proc/sys/fs/ . It might help...? Cheers Andrew Alex Vorobiev wrote: > we experience intermittent failures with user lookups via nss/ldap. > we observe the same problems with RedHat 7.0 or 7.1, openldap-2.0.7 or > 2.0.8, and nss_ldap 149 (various releases). [...]
