Fedora 8 LDAP Login Problem

NoisyHeathen · #1 9th January 2008, 04:56 PM

I'm having a login problem on all my Fedora 8 machines. I have about 6 - 8 machines all doing the same thing and a bunch of older distros (mostly 5 and 6) and a bunch of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 and 5 machines that work fine.

Anyway, the problem is that the first LDAP login after boot hangs. In other words, I boot the box and log in as JoeSmith. JoeSmith will authenticate with the AD server and the screen turns the default KDE blank blue background that you typically get right before the KDE login status app (with the flashing icons as it tells you what piece is currently loading) comes up. It hangs right there. You never see that status app. I'm forced to do a Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in as root, and kill the /usr/bin/X process. Fedora then automatically restarts gdm and on the next login attempt, all is fine. I have all my Linux machines configured to use a Windows Active Directory server for network logins. The home directories are auto-mounted to an NFS share on another Windows server running Services for Unix. As I mentioned, the older distros and the RHEL machines are working fine and the Fedora 8 machines work fine after you get past that initial glitch.

Can anyone give any suggestions? This could prove to be very annoying at best or quite problematic at worst.

hellork · #2 9th January 2008, 06:13 PM

(is there) Anything interesting in the logs?

NoisyHeathen · #3 10th January 2008, 08:51 PM

Nothing as far as I can see. I wonder if there's an update that fixes it, though. My laptop didn't have the problem this morning after I updated yesterday.

Pierre Albarede · #4 15th February 2008, 10:57 AM

We had about the same boot hang problem with Fedora 7, after activating LDAP in Menu System > Administration > Authentication. It seems that Fedora keeps trying to connect, even though it is misconfigured.

At least, we could restore the system with Ctrl-Alt-F1 log in as root ... commenting everything out in /etc/ldap.conf.

The problem may occur also if the LDAP server is down.

UraniumWilly · #5 15th February 2008, 02:04 PM

Like previously stated, if LDAP server is unreachable or TLS/SSL settings are wrong, your machine will hang.

The solution is to tell nss_ldap to continue even if it encounters problems. This way, you can still login as root, and fix it.

Edit: /etc/ldap.conf
Change: #bind_policy hard
to: bind_policy soft

Good luck.

NoisyHeathen · #6 16th February 2008, 02:52 AM

I ran across a trick on an Ubuntu forum that helps ease the pain I'm still having with this. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace will reset X and bring you back to the login screen. It's far easier than the above-suggested Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in as root trick.

Regarding UraniumWilly's post, I've done that in the past, but I seem to recall there was some undesirable side-effect from setting it that way. I also wonder if there's a better way around it. I was playing around with the PAM configuration the other day, but Fedora always seems to want to authenticate through LDAP whether or not an ID is local.

Also, my LDAP server is on the network and perfectly reachable when this happens. It's just the first login that fails, too. Not the second or any subsequent login. VNC sessions will do the same thing if you connect to an xinetd-launched VNC session first thing after the machine boots.