Why LDAP auth doesnt work correctly on Ubuntu 16 and 17

Simple answer: because systemd and incorrect dependencies. Simple solution: disable libnss-ldap, nscd and write your own startscript

This article is a thorough analysis of ubuntu ldap auth problem.

The whole bad day started with broken boot from ubuntu usb flash. We tried booting ubuntu live usb stick and installed it on another usb flash drive 8GB. Booting and detection of WiFi, NIC and other hw was excelent. We can compare to Debian 9.0, which doesn't have necessary non-free firmwares which is an abnormal pain in the lower side followed by lspci gymnastics and searching binary firmwares.

First instalation fail was the swap. There is no need to install Ubuntu on PC with 16GB RAM with using a swap file or partition, especialy on a slow usb flash drive.

Second fail - finaly the instalation asked for more space then 5GB so we had to repartition the flash drive. 6GB were ok, but instalation failed after one hour. Creating 7GB partition and do everything again worked like a charm. We had a very good reasons why not to use whole flash drive.

Third fail - grub install failed. Instalation incomplete. I gave up - had a lot of programming - so I asked my colleague if he could try the installation himself. Different Ubuntu image failed exactly the same way. So we had to create a new 256MB EFI partition, mount it under /boot/efi and then grub-install worked. When we chose 8GB install partition, we had to do all the install again, because we couldn't create the 256MB efi partition.

Now the ubuntu is booting and running correctly. It detects wifi nic and gets ip. This step is very important, because it was the last working state for another day.