I currently have about eight servers running a mixture of CentOS x86_64 v5.2 and v5.3 but none with the very latest updates. They all obtain their authentication information over LDAP and to avoid the starting message bus hang problem[1], nscd is set to soft failure.
However, yesterday I set up a new CentOS v5.3 server with the latest updates, but it refuses to get beyond "Starting message bus" if I have ldap as an option in nsswitch.conf. The LDAP server is hosted on two separate machines and this machine has an identical set up to the others - including soft failure in the nscd config.
If I remove all references to ldap from nsswitch.conf I can get the machine to boot. I can then add those entries back, start nscd and getent works fine. However, when I start samba it then starts to fail stating that it cannot find a users unix account - which is clearly incorrect!
To compound matters, ssh now seems to be locking up; freezing after requesting a password and eventually dropping connection. As I am working off-site for the test of the week I cannot post any further information at the moment, however, I think that the installed kernel had a September 2009 compile date.
Does anyone know of any reason why the latest updates could be causing this behaviour? I have been unable to find anything relevant in the list archives or in the forums.
I am under pressure to get this server working and I don't want to be forced to install Windows, so any advice would be appreciated.
Many thanks,
Ben