Aha gotcha. I was under the impression that SSSD chose the fastest AD server it could find(either via the SRV records, or via a pre-determined list)? I've not had too much trouble with it stubbornly binding to the furthest away server. (thats with AD doing the DNS and delegation to BIND )

NSCD (name service caching daemon) is in RHEL and debian, so I assume it'll be in ubuntu as well. The problem is that it fights with SSSD if you're not careful. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

out of interest, what are you using to bind to AD?