[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#524691: I finally managed to debug this

[Anton Ivanov]

This is a race which occurs when a laptop is using NIS or other
non-local name service and there are temporary failures in getpw* family
of functions due to it being unavailable until the network is up. 

This occurs even if groups like powerdev, etc are local as long as the
user is served by the network based name service.

The workarounds are:

1. Configure caching in nscd to ensure that it does not expire relevant
information.
2. If using a NIS slave on a laptop configure ypbind/ypserv to NOT use
hal and to be local only.

Some of these can be detected in postinst or even at startup and produce
warnings to the sysadmin/user.

Brgds, 
-- 
   Understanding is a three-edged sword:
            your side, their side, and the truth. --Kosh Naranek

A. R. Ivanov
E-mail:  aivanov at sigsegv.cx
WWW:     http://www.sigsegv.cx/
pub 1024D/DDE5E715 2002-03-03 Anton R. Ivanov <arivanov at sigsegv.cx>
    Fingerprint: C824 CBD7 EE4B D7F8 5331  89D5 FCDA 572E DDE5 E715