nixos/nscd: only drop privs after nss module init

NixOS usually needs nscd just to have a single place where
LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be set to include all NSS modules, but nscd is also
useful if some of the NSS modules need to read files which are only
accessible by root.

For example, nixos/modules/config/ldap.nix needs this when
  users.ldap.enable = true;
  users.ldap.daemon.enable = false;
and users.ldap.bind.passwordFile exists. In that case, the module
creates an /etc/ldap.conf which is only readable by root, but which the
NSS module needs to read in order to find out what LDAP server to
connect to and with what credentials.

If nscd is started as root and configured with the server-user option in
nscd.conf, then it gives each NSS module the opportunity to initialize
itself before dropping privileges. The initialization happens in the
glibc-internal __nss_disable_nscd function, which pre-loads all the
configured NSS modules for passwd, group, hosts, and services (but not
netgroup for some reason?) and, for each loaded module, calls an init
function if one is defined. After that finishes, nscd's main() calls
nscd_init() which ends by calling finish_drop_privileges().

There are provisions in systemd for using DynamicUser with a service
which needs to drop privileges itself, so this patch does that.

2 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.conf b/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.conf
index bd802bd3c2e..2b7523a7346 100644
--- a/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.conf
+++ b/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.conf
@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@
 # fallback to trying to handle the request by itself. Which won't work as glibc
 # is not aware of the path in which the nss modules live.  As a workaround, we
 # have `enable-cache yes` with an explicit ttl of 0
+server-user             nscd
 
 enable-cache            passwd          yes
 positive-time-to-live   passwd          0
diff --git a/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.nix b/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.nix
index d094e9893ff..c2d0cd5d0eb 100644
--- a/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.nix
+++ b/nixos/modules/services/system/nscd.nix
@@ -53,7 +53,7 @@ in
         ];
 
         serviceConfig =
-          { ExecStart = "@${pkgs.glibc.bin}/sbin/nscd nscd";
+          { ExecStart = "!@${pkgs.glibc.bin}/sbin/nscd nscd";
             Type = "forking";
             DynamicUser = true;
             RuntimeDirectory = "nscd";