On Ubuntu 15.04, lxc-start-ephemeral's call to pwd.getpwnam always
fails. While I haven't been able to prove it or track down an exact
cause, I strongly suspect that glibc does not guarantee that you can
call NSS functions after a context switch without re-execing. (Running
"id root" in a subprocess from the same point works fine.)
It's safer to use getent to extract the relevant line from the passwd
file and parse it directly.