dbus and ldap == hangs at boot

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi Friends!

I have a laptop that is most of the time used as a desktop, connected to a lan. Users authenticate through LDAP and their /homes are mounted using NFS.

Everything is working very fine, but... If I try to use the laptop disconnected from the lan, the boot hangs when starting DBUS. According to a few sparse references I have found, the problem seems that DBUS is trying to figure something out through LDAP (via nss_ldap). As the laptop is not connected, no LDAP server, so hanging forever.

Setting bind_policy to soft in /etc/ldap.conf was of no avail either.

Any hints?

Thanks a lot in a advance, Cantão!

ellingsw · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Kansas, USA

I have a desktop machine that is configured to authenticate users via LDAP and /home is NFS mounted. My machine is connected to the network all the time, however, no ethernet devices are up by the time D-BUS attempts to start.

During boot my machine hangs for a bit after it displays "Cleaning /tmp directory" then it hangs indefinitely when it gets to "Starting D-BUS system messagebus". And no my problem with cleaning /tmp is not due to the tpm devices line in /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules because I already commented it out.

As of right now, I've been waiting for my desktop to boot for about 5 hours. I can't tell you which version of D-BUS is installed because I cannot get my machine booted far enough to look.

Also, one other thing that really bothers me is if the LDAP server is unavailable I cannot even login as root on my desktop.

ellingsw · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Kansas, USA

I was finally able to boot my system to a point where I could disable dbus and reboot. Some services failed to start because they were unable to find the dbus service but at least I can login now.

I currently have dbus-0.60-r4 installed, which was installed on March 19. I performed an emerge sync, updated to dbus-0.61-r1 then rebooted, however, this did not fix the issue.

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi ellingsw!

Sorry for the delay in response! It' Sunday *and* I was in the middle of a power shortage.

I'm currently phisically far from the mentioned laptop, but what I can tell you now is that the "Cleaning /tmp" issue simply vanished with -- I guess -- the last baselayout update. But the D-BUS issue is really annoying.

I have created a local (non LDAP) user to be used when disconnected from the net, and took the machine for a presentation within a client's office. My surprise? The laptop simply stuck at the D-BUS thing. Very unconfortable to have 5 pairs of eyes staring blankly at you :-D

Anyway, I have to fix this @*#($@%&$ for a new presentation wednesday. I'll try the last ~x86 dbus to see what happens. I'll keep in touch, in case of success.

Worth telling you that my /etc/nsswitch.conf is set as "files ldap". To my understanding, the system should look *first* on local files, then on LDAP, if the information (users, groups, whatever) is not locally available. Am I correct about this?

Best regards and good luck, Cantão!

.:chrome:.

set in /etc/ldap.conf

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi k.gothmog!

Yes, I tried that (it's on the original post). It didn't work and had a side effect, disallowing me to ssh into the machine. Had to revert it.

Thanks a lot, Cantão!

UberLord · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 11:35 am Post subject:

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi UberLord!

UberLord · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 1:10 pm Post subject:

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi UberLord!

UberLord · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 1:55 pm Post subject:

It will also do a ldap lookup if it searchs for a user/uid not in /etc/passwd
_________________
Use dhcpcd for all your automated network configuration needs
Use dhcpcd-ui (GTK+/Qt) as your System Tray Network tool

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

ellingsw · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Kansas, USA

I found the command "chown 0:0 /tmp/.{ICE,X11}-unix" was re-introduced into /etc/init.d/bootmisc after I had already changed it to "chown root:root /tmp/.{ICE,X11}-unix"---I can't remember the bug number. I have since updated to baselayout-1.12.4-r7 and the command is now commented out by default in the init script. I have not rebooted yet to see if my problem with "Cleaning /tmp" is fixed or at least does not delay as long.

According to the documentation on nsswitch.conf you are correct cantao but it does not appear to work that way. Of course, this does apply to calls to getpwent functions. I don't know if there are other functions that implement password `db' lookups and what programs would use them, however, I doubt /bin/login would use them.

I have the following in /etc/nsswitch.conf:

UberLord · Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 7:15 am Post subject:

ellingsw · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Kansas, USA

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Well, as ellingsw said, bind_policy soft is a shoot on the feet, at least for remote admin

I have just given up. I'll duplicate accounts locally on the laptop and free it from LDAP.

Thanks to everybody, Cantão!

mattsk · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:17 pm Post subject:

I'm having similar problems. Have you tried using the timelimit or bind_timelimit in /etc/ldap.conf? Or have you tried downgrading versions of nss_ldap?

In my case, if the ldap service isn't started yet (or has been stopped for some reason) then the system is *really* slow. I've worked out that it's the system trying to connect to the ldap server for a user or group search, and I also have

mattsk · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:22 pm Post subject:

Update: my other server running version 239-r1 doesn't skip a beat when the ldap server is down. If I call groups <user> when the ldap server is up I get hte groups for that user, and if I call it when the server is down, I get an "unknown user" error.

The servers have identical /etc/nsswitch entries for "passwd:, groups:, and shadow:"

I just downgraded to that version on the main and all seems to be well. No pauses, and no need to edit nsswitch.conf to restart the ldap server.

I've temporarily solved the problem by putting

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi Mattsk!

Thanks a lot for your reply.

Tomorrow I'll have the laptop in hands, so I can give the several nss_ldap versions a try. I'll see what happens with the unstable versions and I'll post the results here.

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

It only gets worse...

I could not check the laptop (is was travelling), but I performed several updates on some machines (monolitic Xorg -> non-monolitic Xorg, openssl and gnutls), all by the book, with several revdep-rebuilds to make sure everything was ok.

And then, these updated machines are hanging at DBUS also, even connected to the LAN and with the LDAP server working fine.

I'm trying to boot them to re-emerge dbus and nss_ldap. Let's see what happens.

Cheers, Cantão!

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

blubbi · Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 1:29 pm Post subject:

Now I ran into the same problem.

System is stable and up-to-date.

Only thing that is ~x86 is udev to solve the nss_ldap and udev problem (a user called tss causes a ldap lookup) described here
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99564

I worked around this problem in the following way.

I don't have any local users so I added all system users to /etc/ldap.conf:

cantao · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 166

Hi Friends!

In fact, I gave up on this... I recreated all users locally on the laptop, without any mention to LDAP on pam or nsswitch.conf. This way I can use the NFS mounted /home if the lan is up, or a local user if the laptop is unconnected.

Not the most elegant solution, but it worked anyway.

Thanks to all, Cantão!

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5947

i currently have this problem as well. i believe i'm just going to hardmask the new openldap/nss_ldap/udev versions until they fix these bootup/login bugs. tbh, this has been a problem for quite some time, and i can't believe that it hasn't been fixed properly. bind_policy soft and nss_reconnect only make this problem worse.

cheers
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ellingsw · n00b Joined: 31 May 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Kansas, USA

Heads Up!

I had to reboot today because my system was not responding to user input from the console even though I could login remotely. Upon boot, the problem with my machine hanging indefinitely at boot when it gets to "Starting D-BUS system messagebus" is back.

I was able to get the system booted by restarting and performing an interactive boot... skipping dbus of course when it asked if I wanted to start it. After the system and NIC were up, I was able to start dbus without a problem.

I have not determined the cause of it this time but I'll see if I can figure it out.

The latest version of nss_ldap on my machine is 249 and was installed on Oct 14, 2006. My last reboot was Nov 12, 2006, which I did not have a problem with.

I have rsync 4 times since then and performed at least 2 updates with an emerge world in there somewhere after upgrading to gcc 4.1.1-r1.

Since Nov 12, the following packages, which are used during boot, have been updated:
baselayout (1.12.6)
udev (103)
dbus (0.62-r2)

There are other packages that have been updated but I doubt they are related to this issue.