On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 9:50 AM Simo Sorce <s...@redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2018-03-07 at 14:24 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 07, 2018 at 02:00:03PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > On 03/07/2018 01:55 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> > > > Yes, SSSD monitors those files and automatically cleans its cache.
> > > >
> > > > However, you're right. On systems not using SSSD (which I suspect is
> a
> > > > nontrivial number of systems running systemd...), people are
> probably still
> > > > using nss and we should call `nscd -i passwd` (plus `group` and
> `shadow`
> > > > where appropriate) if the nscd service is running.
> > >
> > > nscd is supposed to monitor these files, too.
> > >
> > > But is this monitoring sufficient?  RPM will immediately start
> > > installing files after the scriptlet has finished.  nscd and SSSD
> > > may not have completed their cache invalidation at this point, so
> > > this looks like a race condition to me.
> >
> > That sounds like a bug in the cache implementation. nscd and sssd
> > simply _must_ ensure that their copy of passwd is the latest one.
> > Shouldn't be a problem to call fstatat() before generating an answer
> > an invalidate the cache if it returns a different mtime then previously.
>
> The fast cache we provide from sssd is read directly by the client
> (sssd nsswitch plugin) without the involvement of the sssd daemon (or
> it would be slow).
> so there are windows for races if you change a passwd file and then
> immediately read out of the fast caches.
> This is not something we can fix without severely compromising
> performance, which is the raison d'etre of those caches.
>
>
Probably the simplest solution for sysusers would be to execute the change
and then run a wait-loop calling `getpwnam(<newly-added-user>)` until it
gets a successful result (or some reasonable timeout expires, indicating a
bug elsewhere). That way, it can be trusted that sysusers won't return
until the user addition is truly valid.
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