Integration testing done within "make check" needs to run under regular users which have no access to the regular build-configured data and socket locations. Build needs to be configured with custom user-accessible locations to enable integration testing.

Currently, these locations are spread all over the binaries as static strings. The mentions of at least some of the paths can be found by running this command in a regularly-configured build directory:

find -type f -perm -111 -name '*.so*' -or -name 'lt-*' |
    xargs strings -f | grep var/lib/sss

It would be beneficial for sssd, pam_sss, libnss_sss and probably other binaries to support specifying the data and socket locations at startup time. This would allow integration testing to place each instance's data in temporary, user-accessible directories and potentially allow parallel test execution with several sssd instances.

The sssd can receive these locations either through command-line options or through configuration file options. The libraries might need to resort to interpreting environment variables, although this approach might need to be screened for security issues.