I added a user to our ldap server and then realized that I’d made a mistake. So I quickly ran an ldapmodify command to fix my mistake. Unfortunately, I had already run a finger command on the new user, which is when I saw the mistake. After the ldapmodify command, I still saw the mistake, even though I knew that it had been fixed. This problem was due to running nscd on the computer. This handles the passwd and group lookups for running programs and caches the result for the next query. The problem was that I wanted to clear the cache. The solution was to stop nscd, run the finger command which went and got the updated info and then turn nscd back on. Then all was well.