Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 103568
PAM and NSS shouldn't use the same config file
Last modified: 2015-01-07 19:06:29 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Description of problem: Why split ldap.conf into pam-ldap.conf and nss-ldap.conf: When using pam_ldap for authentications, most servers are configured to accept only TLS/SSL connections when doing a none-anon bind. This is, of course, because sending cleartext passwords is bad idea. Usually the LDAP-server is configured to reject bind-attempts, and so it should. Therefore you'll set "ssl start_tls" or use "uri ldaps://127.0.0.1/" or something. The problem with the 'nss_ldap' package on RedHat is that it contains both pam_ldap and nss_ldap, and just one config-file. When replacing eg. NIS with LDAP, you need nss_ldap for other nameservice information. This work just fine, but these searches are also encrypted. Encrypting every connection to the LDAP-server is overkill to say the least. It generates both extra waiting, and load on the server. /etc/ldap.conf is also a default config file for other LDAP-based software. It is read by libldap(OpenLDAP) to determine stuff like extra certificates and such. If you tweak ldap.conf with, say "base cn=NIS,dc=redhat,dc=com" because you only want to search through relevant information when using {pam|nss}_ldap, other programs could fail. Setting a special base for {pam|nss}_ldap is optional, but often reduces the load on the server (depends on what other info is stored on the server). Optimally you want to use "pam_ldap_base cn=users,cn=NIS,dc=redhat,dc=com" and "nss_ldap_base cn=NIS,dc=redhat,dc=com". The main problem is either full encryption or no encryption at all. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): nss_ldap-202-5
*** Bug 103569 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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I've updated this bug to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, since it persists in the latest nss_ldap release. A work-around exists: One can specify 'config=/path/to/ldap.conf' for pam_ldap.so, but I still think that this is a clumsy and unnecessary approach. Clients that need LDAP for both authentication and authorisation need a split configuration. Other distributions, e.g. Debian, use different configuration files for PAM and NSS. I think RHEL should too.
We're not going to change this in an update -- it'll have to be done on the development stream so that it takes effect during a major version upgrade. Marking #553857 as a blocker for this, as it falls out of splitting the two into separate packages, which is what we're doing there. Marking as deferred to that future release.