'ls' hangs FC6

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 1:26 PM, Mark Haney <mhaney at ercbroadband.org> wrote:
> Does anyone have any ideas on why 'ls' would suddenly stop working? I've got
> a FC6 box that acts as a SAN host and for the last week or so I can't ls
> anything.  It sits and does nothing.  Everything else on the box works just
> fine except for that.
>
>  I've got no idea how to even go about debugging this.
>

I have seen this on systems that are using LDAP for authentication.
They don't just authenticate at start time, but they look up user
information every time.  Every single time any command is run, the
system goes off to check user identity on a server.  When there is
network slowdown or server slowdown, then ls is slow.  For us, the
short term fix was to install the nscd to cache the information so the
system does not constantly look on the server.  The long term fix was
to stop authenticating users with LDAP.

pj

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas