pidgin resolver process crashes with ldap accounts

[Oliver Lemke]

Binary package hint: pidgin

When using ldap accounts pidgin (1:2.4.3-0ubuntu1~hardy1) is not able to login to any of my accounts. The error message it gives is:

Could not connect to authentication server: Unable to send request to resolver process.

It seems that the resolver process crashes if the system uses ldap user accounts. Temporarely removing ldap from /etc/nsswitch.conf makes it possible to start pidgin and log in to all accounts. See attached 'pidgin -d' output for details.

[Jurgen Haan (jurgen-easyflex)]

Assuming you're talking about ldap unix accounts and not about ldap im accounts.
This seems to be caused by the pidgin-otr plugin.
Both the pidgin program and the plugin are compiled against libcrypt, and (I read) this causes a problem.
simply by mv-ing /usr/lib/pidgin/pidgin-otr.so to pidgin-otr.so.bak, you can at least use pidgin as your current user while still using LDAP.
I myself am not a developer and have only somewhat mediocre knowledge about this stuff, but this fixed the problem for me.
I only hope the next update I receive on pidging has a fix or workaround for this.

[Oliver Lemke (olemke)]

Thanks Jurgen, your workaround fixed the problem.

[Caspar Clemens Mierau (leitmedium)]

Thank you for the report. I hereby confirm this bug.

[Caspar Clemens Mierau (leitmedium)]

moved to pidgin-otr

[Luis Mondesi (lemsx1)]

I was bitten by this today and moving pidgin-otr worked for me.

what a bug...

[T-Bone (varenet)]

For the record, this bug is not exactly pidgin-otr's fault. It's a "feature" of libgcrypt, by which it can't be used as a shared library by more than one client in the same program (it uses unprotected global variables). libldap and pidgin-otr both use libgcrypt, thus when you use both in pidgin, it goes kaboom. This problem seems to be mostly ignored on libgcrypt's side though.

[pidgin-otr-is-br0ken (pidgin-otr)]

Will this be fixed in pidgin-otr? or libgcrypt? or what? I currently log in on my work machine through ldap, so pidgin-otr is unusable, but I'd really like to use it.
Thanks

[Phil Pratt-Szeliga (pcpratts)]

working on it in my free time

[Sven Neuhaus (sven-neuhaus)]

So, is it a good idea to report this as a libgcrypt bug instead?

[Sven Neuhaus (sven-neuhaus)]

I'm curious - how does Kopete implement OTR? Maybe it does not rely on libgcrypt?
I can use kopete with its OTR plugin on the same system with LDAP just fine...!