/usr/sbin/nscd — name service cache daemon
Nscd is a daemon that provides a cache for the most common
name service requests. The default configuration file,
/etc/nscd.conf
, determines the
behavior of the cache daemon. See nscd.conf(5).
Nscd provides caching for accesses of the passwd(5), group(5), and hosts(5) databases through standard libc interfaces, such as getpwnam(3), getpwuid(3), getgrnam(3), getgrgid(3), gethostbyname(3), and others.
There are two caches for each database: a positive one for items found, and a negative one for items not found. Each cache has a separate TTL (time-to-live) period for its data. Note that the shadow file is specifically not cached. getspnam(3) calls remain uncached as a result.
Nscd doesn't know anything about the underlying protocols
for a service. This also means, that if you change
/etc/resolv.conf
for DNS
queries, nscd will continue to use the old one if you have
configured /etc/nsswitch.conf
to use DNS for host lookups. In such a case, you need to
restart nscd.
nscd.conf(5), nsswitch.conf(5)
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