I see a lot of the following errors on my CentOS/RHEL 5 systems:

nscd: nss_ldap: could not search LDAP server - Server is unavailable

...as well as...

mountd[2808]: nss_ldap: could not search LDAP server - Server is unavailable

This problem often prevents users from logging into a system, but another login attempt
a few minutes later is successful. Also, when actually try to serve up home directories on such
a system, it'll work for a while, then a user's connection to the home directory server will drop
(which causes problems, as you can imagine.... :o)

Any thoughts on this? I do >not< have this problem when using SuSE 11.0, so I'm beginning
to think this is simply a problem with the LDAP packages that come with the distribution.

RHEL5 -
openldap - 2.3.43-3.el5
nss_ldap - 253-22.el5_4

OpenSuSE 11-

openldap - 2.4.9-7.6
nss_ldap - 260-22.1

Current bind policy in ldap.conf is:

bind_policy soft