Loading ...LDAP: troubleshooting “I have no name!”
After performing some security related OS updates, i was receiving from LDAP all sort of strange errors. Like, when you logged on the ldap server as a regular ldap user (not system user) the regular user@host:~$ prompt changed to:
I have no name!@host:~$
Running whoami was also giving errors:
I have no name!@host:~$ whoami
whoami: cannot find name for user ID 2003
and also regular w what showing the following output:
I have no name!@host:~$ w
10:14:51 up 109 days, 21:45, 1 user, load average: 0.92, 1.19, 1.19
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
w: ldap-nss.c:1374: do_init: Assertion `cfg->ldc_uris[__session.ls_current_uri]!= ((void *)0)' failed.
Aborted
Quite ugly, right? Strangely this was working perfectly on all the other systems that were using the LDAP server to authenticate, except as show on the LDAP server itself.
In my case, the issue was caused by the updates setting wrong permissions on /etc/libnss-ldap.conf as read-only for root only (600) and the openldap user was not able to read the file.
If you encounter similar errors you might want to first check if the permissions on /etc/libnss-ldap.conf - on debian (or /etc/ldap.conf on other distros) allow your ldap user to read the file. Hopefully this will help others having the same problem 
14th March 2008, 18:50
Yes!!! Very good!!
Thank You.
26th June 2008, 12:15
Thank you, that works
29th July 2008, 02:33
And also make sure that you install nscd package.
27th August 2008, 03:54
In my case i was recieving same issue . But my libnss-ldap.conf chmod was 644. Then i solved the same problem by setting binddn and bindpw settings.
26th March 2009, 22:52
THANK YOU!
31st March 2009, 19:59
Thank you!
15th April 2009, 19:42
I was experiencing the same problem, but there was nothing wrong with file permissions. The solution turned out to be a simple one: restarting slapd
27th May 2009, 23:05
YEAH! Very cool!.
sudo chmod 644 libnss-ldap.conf
to the rescue!
Thanks!
20th July 2009, 07:18
first result in Google, fixed it in seconds, thank you
4th March 2010, 09:16
Sure, it’s a nice artice.
You could also use nscd then you won’t need to set the permissions of the config to be world readable.
23rd March 2010, 13:15
Hi, I experienced the same issue, (OS Red Hat AS v4 Update 4) thanks Lokk for the fix.
Authorized uses only. All activity may be monitored and reported.
id: cannot find name for user ID 637
id: cannot find name for user ID 637
[I have no name!@web-backup ~]$ logout
In my case the issue was resolved by starting the nscd (Name Service Caching Daemon) as follows:
chkconfig nscd on
service nscd on
bada boom bada bing
24th March 2010, 14:59
If you use LDAP, also check permission on the following files:
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/krb5.conf
/etc/pam.d/system_auth
/etc/pam.d/logins (this was the one for me)
19th April 2010, 20:10
argh this post saved my evening.
With nscd started, everything went fine, but without I had this “I have no name!”
big thanks!
/thorsten
8th June 2010, 16:12
This is fine, but how then to limit ldap.conf from reading when bindpw is set in it !
10th January 2011, 00:41
In my case the permissions were fine, but restart of the nscd daemon helped.
31st January 2011, 03:27
[...] whoami whoami: cannot find name for user ID 1001Despues de buscar un poco en internet me tope con Ducea.com, y di con la solución cambiar los permisos del archivo /etc/lib_nss.conf que seguramente los debes [...]