rbd@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (roger davis) (06/14/90)
Our site has been experiencing a lot of problems with hanging logins on Sun/4s running 4.0.3c. Symptoms are as follows: 1) User enters login name. 2) System responds with 'Password:' prompt. 3) User enters password, and the system hangs indefinitely. There are no 'yp server *** not responding ...' console messages, no nothing. This happens with root logins as well as non-root logins, and happens with rlogins from remote machines as well as local console logins. There are no messages of any kind in /var/adm/messages. If the system is rebooted, the next login attempt will usually succeed, but on several occasions I've had to reboot machines twice before anyone could get in. I am certain that this has nothing to do with a user's home directory (or any other $PATH directory) being temporarily unavailable due to a down server, because users can usually go to an identically configured diskless machine sitting right beside the hung machine and log in with no problem at all. This seems to happen only with diskless clients, which in our case are 4/110s and 4/60s booting off 4/280s and a 4/380. All systems are running 4.0.3c. We are using the automounter for all NFS mounts of home directory filesystems. I'm beginning to suspect some kind of correlation with OpenWindows 1.0, which we've been using more frequently of late, but I've yet to find any smoking gun. Sun software support has been absolutely no help with this. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who has any ideas on what might be causing this or how to run some kind of meaningful test (it's hard to see what's going on with a machine you can't log in to). I'd even be glad to just hear a confirmation of this problem from another site -- misery loves company! Thanks.
HAMISH@waikato.ac.nz (06/28/90)
In article <9280@brazos.Rice.edu>, "John_Lagrue.WGCERX"@xerox.com writes: > rbd@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (roger davis) writes > >>Our site has been experiencing a lot of problems with hanging logins on >>Sun/4s running 4.0.3c. Symptoms are as follows: >> >>1) User enters login name. >>2) System responds with 'Password:' prompt. >>3) User enters password, and the system hangs indefinitely. > > I've had this problem too, and it also happens on SunOS4.1. What seems to > happen is that the SparcStations' login hang if the server has to be > rebooted. Sometimes it frees up after an attemped login has timed out, but > usually I have to reboot the clients. It's a real pain in the *ss! I had the same problem last week. It turned out that the process table was full because of a cron job that was dying and not being removed. Eventually the table would fill up, and a reboot would be necessary. The only way I could gain access to it was doing an rlogin from another machine. A reboot was necessary, as I wasn't going to go through and kill all those jobs, and couldn't be bothered thinking about a script for it (I was in a hurry). BTW The machine was a SparcStation 1 using the generic 4.0.3 kernel. Hope this helps. | Hamish Marson | Internet hamish@waikato.ac.nz | | Computer Support Person | Phone (071)562889 xt 8181 | | Computer Science Department | Amiga 3000 for ME! | | University of Waikato | |