Description of problem:

The nss-ldap package have a few design issues.  One is that each process
create their own connection to the LDAP server, resulting in very many
connections on the server when there are a lot of clients, and the other
is that there is no way for each process to know if the LDAP server is
available or not, and thus the machine become very slow when the LDAP
server is unavailable.

An alternative implementation, initially a fork of nss-ldap, but now
most of the code has been rewritten, is available from
<URL: http://ch.tudelft.nl/~arthur/nss-ldapd/ >.  This version solve
the design issues with nss-ldap.

Please consider integrating nss-ldapd into RHEL.  I've tested it, and it
seem to work very well.  There are still a few minor issues left to fix
for my use, but almost all the issues I had has been fixed by the
very responsive author.