From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Description of problem: system is hanging during some uid->username translations. 'ls -l' in /home hangs. Processes appear to be looping in YP calls. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.cd /home 2.ls -l 3.system will hang Actual Results: when the user doesn't exist in /etc/passwd, system will hang Expected Results: running ls -l under /home should return ownership of the directories. If user doesn't exist in /etc/passwd, should return uid (uid number) Additional info: When you run the ls -l on /home, it tries to resolve the ownership of the directories and if /etc/passwd doesn't have the userid in it, it will just hang. If set /etc/nsswitch.conf to "files nis" (currently is "compat" and under /etc/passwd, we use +userid for security purposes), it will return fine. I was able to fix it in two different way: 1) remove the directories of the users with no login 2) change the ownership to root on the directories
This is wrong component so no wonder it stayed without any notice. However I don't see this behaviour here - so it will be probably CLOSED WORKSFORME or CURRENTRELEASE anyway.
There have been years of fixes in glibc. I have not been able to reproduce this with contemporary distros. In case you are able to reproduce this with a contemporary distribution, please reopen the bug and provide further details.