Comment 27 for bug 572271

I'll look into this -- we call it the 'laptop scenario' we did test it at various points in the development cycle, but perhaps something broke it.

But the CacheEntryExpire setting should not determine whether you can log in when offline. It is to determine whether we try to update values from AD. Many APIs request information about a user -- just doing an 'ls' will cause user lookups. If we did a network traversal each time you would suffer horrendous performance. So we cache the values and update them every so often. I think newer releases may have lowered the expiry to a handful of minutes.

If you are offline, then expired cache entries are just supposed to be used since there is nothing better.