NSS, mail.local and unavailable LDAP

[manu%netbsd.org@localhost (Emmanuel Dreyfus)]

Hello

There must be a simple way of fixing this, but I have not found it yet:

On a mail server, if accounts are stored in an LDAP directory, and if
the LDAP servers all go down, then mail.local will think the destination
accounts do not exist, and the mail server will start bouncing e-mails,
because recipients do not exist.

If the sender account is on the same server, then the DSN bounces back
to another nonexistent user, and it gets lost. This is not very
satifying.

Of course, all the LDAP servers should not go down at the same time, but
that can happen. It would be nice if mail.local could just wait for LDAP
servers to become available again, retrying periodically, instead of
returning that the user does not exists.

How can this be acheived? nsswitch.conf does not allow retrying on the
same source, and neither nss_ldap.conf does.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz
manu%netbsd.org@localhost