[Date Prev][Date Next] [Chronological] [Thread] [Top]

OpenLDAP + Samba + nscd



Hi All.

I've got a problem on one of my Samba boxes that I can't seem to find an
answer for.  I use OpenLDAP as a user/group/password backend for Samba.  I
have one Master OpenLDAP server and two Replicas in remote offices.  In
addition to this I have several other machines that use the LDAP directory
for authentication via SAMBA.  I've constructed my setup primarily from the
IDEALX.org Samba + OpenLDAP PDC HOWTO.

For the most part things work fine.  But I have one machine that acts as my
Print and Backup server that is giving me fits.  It's a RedHat 8.0 box (with
all the updates) running Samba 2.2.7a (compiled to add the LDAP backend),
OpenLDAP 2.0.27 and pam_ldap to glue it all together.  One of the last
things I did was to activate "nscd" to help performance.  (I did this
because the HOWTO said to and I just didn't know any better.)  

Things were fine for several weeks, then we lost connection to our printers.
I found statements like this in the logs on that machine:

"Oct 10 03:45:30 valykyrie nscd: 680: while accepting connection: Too many
open files"

So about two weeks ago, I started keeping track of open files, and the
number of files that nscd was using.  I have this MRTG graph that shows the
results.  http://nesbittengineering.com/mrtg/valfiles.html

As you can see, last Friday around 4:00 am, nscd ran out of files, and
things came to a halt.  A simple "service nscd restart" fixed the problem
and things started working again, but as the graph shows the number of open
files was growing at a pretty good rate.  

So last night I shut down nscd.  Things have been working, but I can tell
that I've lost performance.  For example, my backup process ran 13 minutes
longer than normal last night.

All of this leads to the question:  How can I once again activate nscd and
yet not suffer from the open files issue that I have?

I didn't know what conf files (if any) would be appropriate, so I haven't
included any - just ask and I'll supply them.

--
Kevin L. Collins, MCSE
Systems Manager
Nesbitt Engineering, Inc.