nscd - name service cache daemon
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.
- --help
- will give you a list with all options and what they do.
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>
nscd.conf(5),
nsswitch.conf(5)