Interesting bug in fresh CentOS install (or why I'm glad I didn't pay for RHEL support on all my servers) from The Life of a Sysadmin

StAardvarktheCarpeted ran into a really interesting bug the other day, and wrote about it. Apparently on his CentOS 5.2 machines, users who were authenticated against an LDAP server couldn't pipe commands.

Right. 'ls' would work, 'grep' would work, but 'ls | grep' wouldn't work. The problem came down to a bug in the distributed nss_ldap software, and as StAardvark alludes to, the bugzilla discussion is well worth reading.

It's sort of interesting to note that the original bug was issued in May of this year, but an actual fixed package wasn't available until the end of July, even though the upstream software was repaired 5 days after the bug was submitted.

Even CentOS (the free version of RHEL) fixed the bug in June, while RedHat support-paying customers didn't get fixed unless they called support for help. The instructions that they were giving out weren't published until a couple of days before the updated package was released.

I've heard that RedHat support wasn't worth buying, but jeez. To actually punish users by making them wait longer for a fix than the free version is pretty bad. I'll stick with CentOS at this point.