What is SSSD in a nutshell?
SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) is a collection of daemons used by Linux to manage the authentication and authorization to a system. In particular, it can interface with remote directories such as those that use LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), and internally interfaces with NSS (Network Security Services) and PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module). Essentially, it can be configured to control the behaviour of these other services. You can learn more about it here:https://fedorahosted.org/sssd/
The problem?
I was getting the authentication information from a central LDAP directory however, they only provided /bin/csh and the environment variable for the users while I needed it to be/bin/bash in my environment.
Ideally, SSSD would have provided a way to override the shell in its configuration files, unfortunately, at the time of this writing that is only available in version 1.9 of SSSD which is currently in beta with the Fedora project. Further, my systems were Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) which typically runs a few versions behind in most things though security patches and bug-fixes are backported.
