sssd - Man Page

System Security Services Daemon

Synopsis

sssd [options]

Description

SSSD provides a set of daemons to manage access to remote directories and authentication mechanisms​. It provides an NSS and PAM interface toward the system and a pluggable backend system to connect to multiple different account sources as well as D-Bus interface​. It is also the basis to provide client auditing and policy services for projects like FreeIPA​. It provides a more robust database to store local users as well as extended user data​.

Options

-d,--debug-level LEVEL

SSSD supports two representations for specifying the debug level​. The simplest is to specify a decimal value from 0-9, which represents enabling that level and all lower-level debug messages​. The more comprehensive option is to specify a hexadecimal bitmask to enable or disable specific levels (such as if you wish to suppress a level)​.

Please note that each SSSD service logs into its own log file​. Also please note that enabling “debug_level” in the “[sssd]” section only enables debugging just for the sssd process itself, not for the responder or provider processes​. The “debug_level” parameter should be added to all sections that you wish to produce debug logs from​.

In addition to changing the log level in the config file using the “debug_level” parameter, which is persistent, but requires SSSD restart, it is also possible to change the debug level on the fly using the sss_debuglevel(8) tool​.

Currently supported debug levels:

0, 0x0010: Fatal failures​. Anything that would prevent SSSD from starting up or causes it to cease running​.

1, 0x0020: Critical failures​. An error that doesn't kill SSSD, but one that indicates that at least one major feature is not going to work properly​.

2, 0x0040: Serious failures​. An error announcing that a particular request or operation has failed​.

3, 0x0080: Minor failures​. These are the errors that would percolate down to cause the operation failure of 2​.

4, 0x0100: Configuration settings​.

5, 0x0200: Function data​.

6, 0x0400: Trace messages for operation functions​.

7, 0x1000: Trace messages for internal control functions​.

8, 0x2000: Contents of function-internal variables that may be interesting​.

9, 0x4000: Extremely low-level tracing information​.

9, 0x20000: Performance and statistical data, please note that due to the way requests are processed internally the logged execution time of a request might be longer than it actually was​.

10, 0x10000: Even more low-level libldb tracing information​. Almost never really required​.

To log required bitmask debug levels, simply add their numbers together as shown in following examples:

Example: To log fatal failures, critical failures, serious failures and function data use 0x0270​.

Example: To log fatal failures, configuration settings, function data, trace messages for internal control functions use 0x1310​.

Note: The bitmask format of debug levels was introduced in 1​.7​.0​.

Default: 0x0070 (i​.e​. fatal, critical and serious failures; corresponds to setting 2 in decimal notation)

--debug-timestamps=mode

1: Add a timestamp to the debug messages

0: Disable timestamp in the debug messages

Default: 1

--debug-microseconds=mode

1: Add microseconds to the timestamp in debug messages

0: Disable microseconds in timestamp

Default: 0

--logger=value

Location where SSSD will send log messages​.

stderr: Redirect debug messages to standard error output​.

files: Redirect debug messages to the log files​. By default, the log files are stored in /var/log/sssd and there are separate log files for every SSSD service and domain​.

journald: Redirect debug messages to systemd-journald

Default: not set (fall back to journald if available, otherwise to stderr)

-D,--daemon

Become a daemon after starting up​.

-i,--interactive

Run in the foreground, don't become a daemon​.

-c,--config

Specify a non-default config file​. The default is /etc/sssd/sssd​.conf​. For reference on the config file syntax and options, consult the sssd.conf(5) manual page​.

-?,--help

Display help message and exit​.

--version

Print version number and exit​.

Signals

SIGTERM/SIGINT

Informs the SSSD to gracefully terminate all of its child processes and then shut down the monitor​.

SIGHUP

Tells the SSSD to stop writing to its current debug file descriptors and to close and reopen them​. This is meant to facilitate log rolling with programs like logrotate​.

SIGUSR1

Tells the SSSD to simulate offline operation for the duration of the “offline_timeout” parameter​. This is useful for testing​. The signal can be sent to either the sssd process or any sssd_be process directly​.

SIGUSR2

Tells the SSSD to go online immediately​. This is useful for testing​. The signal can be sent to either the sssd process or any sssd_be process directly​.

SIGRTMIN+1

Tells the SSSD to reschedule the periodic tasks​. The internal watchdog sends this signal to the providers when a clock shift is detected although it can be sent to any sssd_be process directly​.

Exit Status

0

SSSD was shutdown gracefully​.

1

Bad configuration or command line option​.

2

Memory allocation error​.

6

SSSD is already running​.

Other codes

Other codes denote different errors, most probably about missing required access rights​. See SSSD and system logs for details​.

Notes

If the environment variable SSS_NSS_USE_MEMCACHE is set to "NO", client applications will not use the fast in-memory cache​.

If the environment variable SSS_LOCKFREE is set to "NO", requests from multiple threads of a single application will be serialized​.

See Also

sssd(8), sssd.conf(5), sssd-ldap(5), sssd-ldap-attributes(5), sssd-krb5(5), sssd-simple(5), sssd-ipa(5), sssd-ad(5), sssd-idp(5), sssd-sudo(5), sssd-session-recording(5), sss_cache(8), sss_debuglevel(8), sss_obfuscate(8), sss_seed(8), sssd_krb5_locator_plugin(8), sss_ssh_authorizedkeys(1), sss_ssh_knownhosts(1), sssd-ifp(5), pam_sss(8)​. sss_rpcidmapd(5) sssd-systemtap(5)

Authors

The SSSD upstream - https://github​.com/SSSD/sssd/

Referenced By

adcli(8), idmap_sss(8), mount.cifs(8), pam_sss(8), pam_sss_gss(8), sss_cache(8), sssctl(8), sssd-ad(5), sssd.conf(5), sss_debuglevel(8), sssd-idp(5), sssd-ifp(5), sssd-ipa(5), sssd-kcm(8), sssd-krb5(5), sssd_krb5_localauth_plugin(8), sssd_krb5_locator_plugin(8), sssd-ldap(5), sssd-ldap-attributes(5), sssd_selinux(8), sssd-session-recording(5), sssd-simple(5), sssd-sudo(5), sssd-systemtap(5), sss_obfuscate(8), sss_override(8), sss_rpcidmapd(5), sss_seed(8), sss_ssh_authorizedkeys(1), sss_ssh_knownhosts(1).

08/19/2026 SSSD Manual pages