Description of problem: I encountered a hang while installing nagios-nrpe on a LDAP authentication enabled system. The hang was associated with the useradd command. Specifically. /usr/sbin/useradd -r -d /var/log/nagios -s /bin/sh -c nagios nagios Only way to get the above command to work was to remove the "ldap" fields from /etc/nsswitch.conf I was surprised this was a problem as I have pam_min_uid set at 5000 set in /etc/ldap.conf so with the -r flag it shouldnt have even gone to ldap while adding this account. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. configure auth to an ldap server, w/o admin ability to create account in ldap 2. attempt to install any rpm that creates a service account 3. watch it hang Additional info:
This delay most likely occurs when useradd attempts to find an unused UID to assign to the new nagios account. Basically, it has to guess by choosing a UID, checking if there's already a user with that ID, and if there is, checking the next higher one, continuing until it finds one that isn't used. It can take a while, but I believe that tweaking the UID_MIN and UID_MAX values in /etc/login.defs to adjust the range which useradd checks will solve this. Marking this works-for-me because I believe it's solvable in the configuration.