My original post:
>At various times (no observed pattern) on various OS levels (2.5/6/7) and various
>h/w platforms (220/420/250/e1000) the following message appears when a user tries
>to telnet/rlogin or sometimes just with telnet (rlogin works) and the login attempt
>fails.
>
>**message starts**
>
>Cannot create utmpx entry. You must exec "login" from the lowest level "shell".
>
>**messge ends**
>
>SUN cannot provide any solution(!). The only solution seems to be to zero out /var/adm/utmpx
>in single-user mode. But obviously its a very irritating proposition for 24x7 production
>machines.
>
>Any solution/insight will be appreciated. Will summarize.
>
The following people provided helpful insight (apologize if i left someone out) :
*************************
suri@mtcts1.ho.lucent.com (Was kind enough to send me a script to safely truncate
/var/adm/wtmp and /var/adm/wtmpx)
Paul Hedgepeth <hedgepethp@yahoo.com>
"Stuart, Reggie (GXS, Maxim)" <Reggie.Stuart@gxs.ge.com>
James Ranks <ranks@avnasis.jccbi.gov>
Jarrett Carver <solarboyz1@hotmail.com
Casper Dik <Casper.Dik@holland.sun.com>
*************************
Reasons: Basically all the replies point towards one or more of the following reasons:
1)Some application (like acct or some third party app) writing to utmpx and corrupting
it.
2)/var filling up. Also possible due to wtmp and wtmpx files growing in size.
3)Some inconsistency with user-ids causing utmpx to get corrupted. (suggested by
Reggie Stuart)
4)Some customization error in the syslogd files. (suggested by Reggie Stuart)
Solution: In my case i have verified and can definitely rule out reasons 1,2 and
4 . I still have to investigate reason 3 since we have a user database of more than
8000 users and there is possibility of inconsistent user ids. Also we have multiple
usernames with the same user id of 0 (for root access) and that might very well
be the cause of the problem.
Thanks for ur help guys.
Rahul Sen
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
FREE global voice/fax/e-mail in your mailbox at http://www.hotvoice.com
S
U BEFORE POSTING please READ the FAQ located at
N ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/sun-managers/faq
. and the list POLICY statement located at
M ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/sun-managers/policy
A To submit questions/summaries to this list send your email message to:
N sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu
A To unsubscribe from this list please send an email message to:
G majordomo@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu
E and in the BODY type:
R unsubscribe sun-managers
S Or
. unsubscribe sun-managers original@subscription.address
L To view an archive of this list please visit:
I http://www.latech.edu/sunman.html
S
T
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:14:19 CDT