Bug#420604: nscd: coredumps (ldap related?)

[Jameson Rollins <jrollins@phys.columbia.edu>]

I have been experiencing what I believe is this same problem on an etch amd64
machine.  We started experiencing weird passwd resolution issues for LDAP users
that I traced to a failing nscd server.  When started manually with the -d
option, the following failure occurs within the first 30 seconds:

zajos:0:~# /usr/sbin/nscd -d
...
1508: add new entry "Dherzka" of type GETPWBYNAME for passwd to cache (first)
nscd: cache.c:144: cache_add: Assertion `newp->key + newp->len <=
table->head->first_free' failed.
Aborted
zajos:134:~# 

I cleared all of the files in /var/db/nscd/ and that seems to have worked
(ie. nscd has not crashed since I restarted it after clearing the database
files).  I will keep monitoring the situation.  If nscd does crash again because
of database corruption, it would seem to me that there is a fairly serious
problem with nscd writing bad (ie. crash-inducing) data into the database.  I
will try to do a better job of saving the database files for debugging if there
is another crash.

jamie.