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Name

Synopsis

Availability

Description

nscd provides cacheing for the passwd(4) , group(4) and hosts(4) databases through standard libc interfaces, such as gethostbyname(3N) , gethostbyaddr(3N) , and others. Each cache has a separate time-to-live for its data; modifying the local database (/etc/hosts, and so forth) causes that cache to become invalidated within ten seconds. Note that the shadow file is specifically not cached. getspnam(3C) calls remain uncached as a result.

nscd also acts as its own administration tool. If an instance of nscd is already running, commands are passed to the running version transparently.

In order to preserve NIS+ security, the startup script for nscd (/etc/init.d/nscd) checks the permissions on the passwd, group and host tables if NIS+ is being used. If those tables are not readable by unauthenticated users, then caching is disabled so that each process continues to authenticate itself as before.

nscd does not rescan the /etc/nsswitch.conf file; if this file is changed, the machine should be rebooted or nscd stopped and restarted, as shown in the EXAMPLES below.

Options

-f configuration-file

Causes nscd to read its configuration data from the specified file.

-g

Prints current configuration and statistics to standard output. This is the only option executable by non-root users.

-e cachename, yes|no

Enables or disables the specified cache.

-i cachename

Invalidate the specified cache.

Examples

    example# /etc/init.d/nscd stop 
    example# /etc/init.d/nscd start

Files

See Also

Warnings

Table of Contents

• Name
• Synopsis
• Availability
• Description
• Options
• Examples
• Files
• See Also
• Warnings