MySQL Bugs: #5301: /etc/nsswitch.conf "compat" kills 4.1.3

Bug #5301	/etc/nsswitch.conf "compat" kills 4.1.3
Submitted:	30 Aug 2004 21:11	Modified:	30 Aug 2004 21:44
Reporter:	Greg Newby	Email Updates:
Status:	Duplicate	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server	Severity:	S3 (Non-critical)
Version:	4.1.3	OS:	Linux (Linux)
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
On a dual Xeon system running SuSE 9.0, the binary release of 4.1.3 via icc crashes on start (mysql-standard-4.1.3-beta-pc-linux-i686-icc).  I added a "strace" to see where it was crashing, and was led to /etc/nsswitch.conf.  A little experimentation showed that the entries "passwd: compat" and "group: compat" needed to be changed, to something like "passwd: files".

This seems like some weird behavior, but there it is.  I didn't test with other Linux flavors, but found that the gcc version would run fine (mysql-max-4.0.20-pc-linux-i686).

It's hard to tell whether this is some sort of bug in this particular SuSE release, or something with glibc, or with the Intel compilers.  But I hope this behavior finds its way into the release notes, to save other folks from needing to do all the research to track this problem down.  This is on a glibc 2.3 system (libc.so.6).

How to repeat:
Download the binary versions mentioned below; run the icc version and presumably replicate the crash.  Then, edit /etc/nsswitch.conf as shown, and see things succeed.

Suggested fix:
This might just need some sort of message in the installation notes.  It doesn't appear to be a problem with MySQL, though it might have to do with the intersection of mysql and the libraries used by icc.

Thanks, this is just another side effect of statically linking binaries against an unmodified
version of glibc - this is already under discussion in bug#4408.

I will resolve this one as a duplicate of bug#4408.