With nscd running, a user added by useradd(8) can't immediately be deleted by userdel(8). These tools attempt to notify the nscd using the socket, but the path to the socket has been changed and the shadow tools still use the old path. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. /etc/init.d/nscd start 2. useradd fred 3. userdel fred Actual Results: (standard prompt modified to include $?:) 0: domus root # id fred id: fred: No such user 1: domus root # useradd fred 0: domus root # userdel fred userdel: user fred does not exist 6: domus root # id fred uid=1101(fred) gid=100(users) groups=100(users) Expected Results: Deleted user. Shutting down nscd allows the user to be deleted. strace(1) shows that usermod is attempting to talk to nscd via: /var/run/.nscd_socket whereas this should now be: /var/run/nscd/socket Inside the sys-apps/shadow source, lib/nscd.c contains a definition of _PATH_NSCDSOCKET which can be changed to the correct path to get a working set of tools.
I have a related bug to report: because nscd now expects its pidfile to be in /var/run/nscd/, if that directory doesn't exist, nscd won't start (but since the /etc/init.d/nscd script doesn't handle this case, it just fails silently, and you don't notice anything is wrong). Recommended fix for this: create the directory if it doesn't already exist, and correct the --pid argument in stop().
shadow-4.0.6-r1 fixes the location of the socket, thanks !
