allowing local accounts when LDAP is unavailable?

Folks;

I'm running pam_ldap 180 on SuSE SLES 10 SP2. I just discovered that
when the LDAP clients cannot access the LDAP server (for example, when
the network goes down), users that are defined locally (i.e. root)
cannot log in until LDAP becomes available again. This is a problem if,
for example, LDAP cannot be reached because of a network configuration
problem on the client.

Apr 30 13:08:19 vm-ldap-2 login[1854]: pam_ldap: ldap_starttls_s: Can't
contact LDAP server

This text appears on the console:

Error in service module

I tried adding ignore_authinfo_unavailable to the options following
pam_ldap.so in all the config files which refer to it. It didn't or
change the behavior in any obvious way.

Is this a bug in pam_ldap, or am I misunderstanding what
ignore_authinfo_unavailable is designed to do? More importantly, what
can I do to allow locally defined users to log in while LDAP is
unavailable?

Thanks!

ok
r.