nscd

Description

nscd is a daemon that provides a cache for the most common name service requests. The default configuration file, /etc/nscd.conf, determines the behavior of the cache daemon. See nscd.conf(5).

nscd provides caching for accesses of the passwd(5), group(5), hosts(5) services(5) and netgroup databases through standard libc interfaces, such as getpwnam(3), getpwuid(3), getgrnam(3), getgrgid(3), gethostbyname(3), and others.

There are two caches for each database: a positive one for items found, and a negative one for items not found. Each cache has a separate TTL (time-to-live) period for its data. Note that the shadow file is specifically not cached. getspnam(3) calls remain uncached as a result.

Options

--help

will give you a list with all options and what they do.

Notes

The daemon will try to watch for changes in configuration files appropriate for each database (e.g., /etc/passwd for the passwd database or /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf for the hosts database), and flush the cache when these are changed. However, this will happen only after a short delay (unless the inotify(7) mechanism is available and glibc 2.9 or later is available), and this auto-detection does not cover configuration files required by nonstandard NSS modules, if any are specified in /etc/nsswitch.conf. In that case, you need to run the following command after changing the configuration file of the database so that nscd invalidates its cache:

$ nscd -i <database>

See Also

nscd.conf(5), nsswitch.conf(5)

Colophon

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Referenced By

nscd.conf(5), nscd_selinux(8).