If nscd is loaded, tar will die. tar zxvf ssh-2.0.12.tar.gz will start extracting but will go *EXTREMELY* slow, about 1 file every ten minutes. This is being tested on a multia with 64megs of RAM, I havn't tested this on my alphastations yet. But will hopefully today.
are you using NIS?
No, But if you do a " install everything " nscd will be installed.
As of the current version (2.1.1-5) it's set up not to run by default. (This may be different in 5.9.7). What's probably happening is that it's trying to use NIS to look up user/group names, and is failing; you can either turn it off, or edit your /etc/nsswitch.conf to not use NIS. Basically, nscd should only be run if you're using NIS/NIS+.