libnss question / how to debug problems

[Christopher Piggott HOME]

I'm reluctant to post this here, but the description of the mailing list
says:

        "User discussion of glibc also occurs here."

I am building a new firewall.  The system has few executables on it, all of
them statically linked programs on it, including BusyBox, ipchains, and
squid.  The problem I have is that various functions need getpwnam() and
similar functions.  Again, the executables that call these are all
statically linked against glibc.  There are no glibc shared libraries on the
system, other than:

        ld-2.3.2.so
        ld-linux.so.2 (symlink to above)

        libnss_compat-2.3.2.so
        libnss_compat.so.2 (symlink to above)

        libnss_files-2.3.2.so
        libnss_files.so.2 (symlink to above).

There is also an nsswitch.conf that calls out 'files.'

Things I have tried that didn't work:

        1) explicitly setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to /lib
        2) using 'compat' instead of 'files'

The reason I'm writing the list is that I have had this problem numerous
times before.  I don't want the full blown glibc on these embedded systems,
however I'm willing to put the correct libnss_ stuff, but I can't get it to
work.  The solution to this problem is not well documented on the internet.
When I figure it out, I will publish a solution that will be useful to
numerous other people who a google search reveals have had the same problem.

I'm not even quite sure how to debug this, other than hacking glibc to put
some debugging in.  I'm not sure what the situation is with glibc3 but I
might suggest an environment variable that gives you some useful feedback,
in particular when dlopen() fails looking for a libnss_* library.

Thanks for your time.

--Chris