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On some of my hosts, I've enabled paranoia mode in nscd with a restart time of 5 minutes. In addition to this, we have a nightly cronjob that restarts nscd. When this cronjob runs, it creates a temporary directory and cd's into it and does everything from there. Shortly after running this script, we get this in the logs: Feb 27 03:17:49 webhost-03 nscd: nscd startup succeeded Feb 27 03:23:02 webhost-03 nscd: 13651 cannot change to old working directory: No such file or directory; disabling paranoia mode Exactly 5 minutes after startup (when paranoia mode would kick in), it tries to cd to the temporary directory and fails (since it no longer exists), thus disabled paranoia mode. When I change our script to cd to / before starting nscd, this problem goes away. For a fix, nscd should cd to / and forget all about whatever directory it was started from. A simpler fix may be to force the 'cd /' in the init script.
I think you should do it in your script rather than in nscd or in the init script. Many people intentionally start the daemon from a particular directory so that it can e.g. drop core files in that directory if something bad happens.