Hi everyone,

I am experiencing an issue with  my systems in that autofs, or even nscd or crond hangs after our RH 3, 4, and 5 machines are being used for a while.  This issue is causing concern that our LDAP install is not stable obviously, and has sent me on a goose chase to find some answers. 

Errors I get in the syslog are that automount: nss_ldap: can not contact LDAP server.

However, I am not using LDAP to store automount maps.  Our home maps are local files that are read, and the entry in nsswitch.conf has automount: files only. 

My theory is that since we are mounting home dirs with automount, it is trying to verify ownership and permision by contacting the server.  However, after a time of users logging in and out on the servers, I have to log in as root and restart autofs to allow users to continue to use the system.

I am not sure if this is an issue with tuning 389 or if it is my client configuration.  I have read about instances where soft binds can cause issues, and instead, people are setting their systems to hard bind and using the nss_reconnect_  values to prevent the connection from hanging infinitly. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Chuck