[CentOS] Can only login as root

Thu May 3 12:47:09 UTC 2012
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

I have a strange problem on a CentOS-5.8 machine.
I can only login as root.
If I try to login with one of the user's names,
it hangs for a long time.
I thought it hung forever, but I just found that
I do login after "su tim" after 5 minutes.

It seems that the problem lies in repeated messages in /var/log/messages
---------------------------
May  3 12:14:13 helen su: nss_ldap: failed to bind to LDAP server 
ldap://www.gayleard.com/: Can't contact LDAP server
May  3 12:14:13 helen su: nss_ldap: reconnecting to LDAP server 
  (sleeping 64 seconds)...
---------------------------

The openldap server is not running, and I don't see why
this authentication is being sought.
There is nothing in /etc/pam.d/su or /etc/pam.d/login
or /etc/ssh/sshd_config to suggest that ldap needs to be invoked,
unless it is a part of system-auth .

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin