Sneaky LDAP name services
I woke up this morning and found I could not get xscreensaver to
prompt me for my password. I couldn’t log in as root. I popped up
the temporary head I have on my OpenBSD box, fired up tcpdump, and saw
nothing of merit. I also forgot to enable Alt-SysRq on my desktop
Linux box. So I hit the reset switch. As it’s coming back up,
automount (of all things) hangs for a long time. A few reboots and
single user modes later, I find there’s another configuration file,
/etc/openldap/ldap.conf that contains the LDAP server’s address.
In this case I’d changed only /etc/ldap.conf and not
/etc/openldap/ldap.conf. I don’t know how it’s determined which
file is used, but once I change the LDAP server in
/etc/openldap/ldap.conf, everything started working again. If you
can, I guess I’d advise just changing it with authconfig in Red
Hat, probably. I’m afraid to run it because I suspect it will
overwrite some of my custom settings. Sigh.