I have a bunch of CentOS 5.x boxes where ssh will occasionally become non-responsive with the message "fatal: Privilege separation user sshd does not exist". But the local user does of course exist. If I login from the console and restart sshd, it comes back just fine. If it provides a clue, the boxes use ldap, but are correctly configured in nsswitch to look for local users first. I was suspicious of nscd, but it isn't running everywhere. I don't find a RHEL bug report that describes this problem. Anyone ever seen this? Suggestions for troubleshooting? I'm stumped. Any suggestion would be appreciated.
