[CentOS] pam_sss fails to close cache files

Fri Jun 3 11:37:41 UTC 2016
Anand Buddhdev <anandb at ripe.net>

Dear folks,

After updating some of our servers to CentOS 6.8, we've noticed that the
ones using pam_sss.so for authentication, appear to be suffering from a
leak of sorts.

On these systems, the /var partition is running out of disk space, and
we eventually noticed that it's because of deleted, but still open files
like these:

httpd      1081    apache    8r      REG              253,2    6406312
     6199 /var/lib/sss/mc/group (deleted)
sshd       1609      root    3r      REG              253,2    8406312
      431 /var/lib/sss/mc/passwd (deleted)
mysqld     2018     mysql    4r      REG              253,2   10406312
      436 /var/lib/sss/mc/initgroups (deleted)

Each time any process uses pam in some way, it's opening these cache
files in /var/lib/sss/mc, but not closing them, and they're
accumulating. The reason they're accumulating is that the initgroups,
group and password file are frequently refreshed (by sssd), and so each
open() call to them looks at a new file.

We traced the sshd process, and noticed this:

open("/var/lib/sss/mc/passwd", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3

But there is no matching "close(3)" call anywhere (all other files
opened have a matching close() system call).

Has anyone else seen this issue, and does anyone know a quick solution
to this?

Regards,
Anand