Hi,

I recently encountered issues where logins on Linux clients using SSSD and the AD provider, pointed directly to an AD server were randomly slow.  Randomly meaning, some clients experienced no slowness at all, other clients consistently had slow logins (30+ seconds sometimes), and yet other clients had random normal/fast logins, and frequent slow logins.

Through troubleshooting, log analysis and experimentation, it appears the fix for this issue is to turn off the PAC service.  Once "pac" was removed from the "services =" line in sssd.conf, the problem client boxes were suddenly consistently fast in terms of user logins.

This deployment has the clients talking directly to AD servers it looks up via the normal AD DNS entries, and uses Unix POSIX attributes in AD for uidnumber and gidnumber etc (e.g. it's not doing any SID -> unix ID translations, it's just pulling them directly from LDAP attributes).

I guess my questions are:

  1. What does PAC actually do?  I've read that it lists a users group as part of a KRB5 response, but also that it might be involved in cross-domain trusts.
  2. When is PAC needed.  Is it only needed for deployments using IPA?
  3. Is there any impact in turning off PAC if the architecture doesn't involve IPA in the mix?
  4. Why would PAC slow down such a architecture seemingly randomly?

I've done a bit of searching and have only found sparse information on sssd_pac, some in Jakob's blog!  I'm trying to understand its role.


Thanks,

- Jim