The name service cache daemon has some serious flaws. One that I notice pretty often in Linux arises when you are using LDAP. It seems that nscd will crash and burn when/if ldap is unavailable. Unfortunately when nscd bombs, it usually takes the entire system with it. Actually what will happen is nscd sockets will start getting broken pipe's and becoming stale until you have several nscd. Eventually your system will slow to a halt. Mind you the box hasn't crashed, but the box is in a dos state. If you do an '$# netstat -an' you'll notice several entries...

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