Unix usernames not resolving in old env for centrify user accounts

[nrcfieldsa]

Users may experience numeric user id only when in the old Compute Canada environment, due to a configuration issue.

When loading modules nixpkgs/16.09 or StdEnv/2018.3 from CVMFS on trixie and then attempting to resolve user names found in the RES domain through Centrify: users are unable to use string usernames vs. numeric user ID format, due to NSS unable to dynamically load a specific library libnss_centrifydc.so.2. Local user accounts in passwd file display OK.

Users can still start their jobs and the unix permissions/ownership works for the numeric Unix ID they are logged in as; however commands such as chown/chmod/id and ls -l will not resolve the usernames properly.

Symptoms:

[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ module load StdEnv/2018.3
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ mkdir test
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ ls -ltr|tail -1
drwxrwxr-x  15 8966466 8966466     16384 Aug  20 16:19 test
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ chown fieldsa test
chown: invalid user: 'fieldsa'
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ id
uid=8966466 gid=8966466 groups=8966466,...
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ id fieldsa
id: ‘fieldsa’: no such user
[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ whoami
whoami: cannot find name for user ID 8966466: No such file or directory
# note - user ID s/// for this ticket

Work-around:

Switch to StdEnv/2020 which is the new default CC environment on trixie at this time.

If launching jobs which make use of older environment use /bin/ls and the system commands (found under /bin:/usr/bin), instead of those provided in the default PATH pointing to CC CVMFS paths.

Root cause:

Library used for supporting centrify is not located in the CVMFS path - except for the most recent StdEnv/2020.

[fieldsa@trixie-hn1 ~]$ ls -l /cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca/gentoo/{2018.3,2019,2020}/lib64/libnss_centrifydc.so*
ls: cannot access '/cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca/gentoo/2018.3/lib64/libnss_centrifydc.so*': No such file or directory
ls: cannot access '/cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca/gentoo/2019/lib64/libnss_centrifydc.so*': No such file or directory
lrwxrwxrwx 1 cvmfs cvmfs 29 Sep  9  2020 /cvmfs/soft.computecanada.ca/gentoo/2020/lib64/libnss_centrifydc.so.2 -> /lib64/libnss_centrifydc.so.2

Something has put this symlink in place and is not in effect for other CC CVMFS environments, so the CVMFS binaries cannot resolve the Centrify user accounts.

[joeydumont]

Hey Allan, I had originally worked with the Compute Canada folks to get this resolved. They had added the symlink in the StdEnv/2020 Gentoo layer only, at it was, even then, the only supported environment going forward, see ComputeCanada/software-stack#40.