Ldap and Ubuntu server a no go - serious problems here.

[George Farris]

Hi all,
A couple of weeks ago I posted a message to the list which I'll repeat
here:

As the development team I thought maybe someone here would have some
insight into an issue with Ubuntu.  We have configured Samba with
Openldap on a couple of machines with different hardware.  Have used
both Hoary and Breezy and experience login locks quite frequently.  We
were hoping to use Ubuntu as a server but it really does seem extremely
unstable.  I have had a Fedora Core 2 machine running the same for over
a year.

It seems Openldap may be the problem to the point of having to reboot
the system.  

The systems can still be pinged so they are alive but essentially
useless.  One can not even CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot the machine.  There is
a local user on the machine and one would expect nsswitch to kick in and
allow the local user in but the login process never reaches a password
prompt.

I'll try and give a more detailed bug report if I find something
concrete but at this point all I know is it locks up.


We have worked on this for some time now and get regular lock ups
overnight.  Sometimes I can login to the machine but trying to run mc
just hangs, I can use other tools such as ls and vi, a reboot always
solves this.

As Jeff suggested I have tried changing to the LDBM backend and that
didn't help, same locks the next day.  Funny the server will run all day
long but die overnight.  All jobs in /etc/cron.daily seem to finish
correctly with no trace of badness in the logs.

The servers are configured for:
Samba/LDAP, libnss-ldap and pam-ldap.

One server will run for a week or so then lock up, the other almost
always locks up over night.  We have added cache settings in the
slapd.conf file and created a DB_CONFIG file for /var/lib/ldap where the
bdb database resides.  We have recreated fresh databases from scratch.

I can post config files if anyone is interested but at this point if
Ubuntu is serious about a server distribution this is a MAJOR show
stopper.  I really have tried everything I can think of and Googled for
days on this.  My next step is to wipe Ubuntu off one of the machines
and install Fedora Core 4 and see where we get to.

If anyone has had good luck running an Ubuntu Samba/LDAP/Login server
without lock ups I would appreciate communicating with them.

It just shouldn't be this difficult to get a machine stay up for long
periods of time.  As I say I have a Fedora Core 2 machine configured
with Samba/LDAP/nss-ldap and pam-ldap which has run for over a year
without problem.


-- 
George Farris   farrisg at mala.bc.ca
Malaspina University-College