topic Re: HPUX slow login in Operating System - HP-UX

HPUX slow login

TalH — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 11:55:50 GMT

Hi,

I have HPUX 11.31 on IA64 that during login (with any user, simple or root, local or NIS) after I type the password and press enter it takes more than 2 minutes to get command prompt.

Any idea what can cause it and how can I solve it?

Thanks,

Tal

Re: HP-UX slow login

Dennis Handly — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:02:07 GMT

How busy is your system?

Re: HP-UX slow login

TalH — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:08:01 GMT

0.01% cpu load... the system is not doing anything.

Re: HP-UX slow login

Dennis Handly — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:50:25 GMT

Can you check to see if nslookup on that machine can find itself?

Re: HP-UX slow login

Steven Schweda — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 20:25:59 GMT

Re: HPUX slow login

pradeep m — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:22:36 GMT

Check the /etc/nsswitch.conf file for the password entry. Make sure if you have the correct entry specified for "passwd" as per your server configuration

Example:

# cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
#
passwd: files --> in this case password use files for resolving
group: files
hosts: dns files
ipnodes: files
services: files

Re: HPUX slow login

TalH — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:33:22 GMT

When I run nslookup I get the correct results for forward & reverse lookup.

The "/etc/nsswitch.conf" file is configured correctly same as on other servers on our network.

Re: HPUX slow login

pradeep m — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:38:16 GMT

How do you login to the server? SSH or telnet.

Do you face the slow login issue in both telnet and ssh??

Re: HPUX slow login

Steven Schweda — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:33:58 GMT

Re: HPUX slow login

TalH — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:04:53 GMT

I use ssh, with telnet the response time is fine and I get the command prompt without delay.

Re: HPUX slow login

Sachin Rajput — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:29:50 GMT

I think you asked same in another thread too .

check the size of /var/adm/wtmp and btmp .

big size of these files sometimes makes ssh slow .

Sachin Rajput
===============

Re: HPUX slow login

TalH — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:24:03 GMT

Thanks! that was it!

Re: HPUX slow login

Sachin Rajput — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:00:21 GMT

ThAnks without Kudos ??????

How to assign points? Click the KUDOS! star! .....

Re: HPUX slow login

TalH — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 06:48:33 GMT

Sorry, i'm a bit new to this system...

Re: HPUX slow login

HPUX-newbie — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 22:09:19 GMT

Sachin - I found that I needed to delete wtmps and btmps, as they were the HUGE files. Now the bigger question... How the heck do I keep these files from getting that large in the first place? Do you know if there is a configuration somewhere that can prevent them growing out of control?

Might be a stupid question, but I am VERY new to HP-UX !

Thanks much!
@Sachin Rajput wrote:
I think you asked same in another thread too .

check the size of /var/adm/wtmp and btmp .

big size of these files sometimes makes ssh slow .

Sachin Rajput
===============

Re: HP-UX slow login (wtmps)

Dennis Handly — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 22:58:10 GMT

>How the heck do I keep these files from getting that large in the first place? Do you know if there is a configuration somewhere that can prevent them growing out of control?

These files grow based on logins. I doubt you want to restrict those. ;-)

You need to archive these files elsewhere and reset the EOF when they grow big.

I.e. you need to create a crontab script to do this. Or tell you to do it manually.

Re: HP-UX slow login (wtmps)

HPUX-newbie — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 23:30:26 GMT

@Dennis Handly wrote:
>How the heck do I keep these files from getting that large in the first place? Do you know if there is a configuration somewhere that can prevent them growing out of control?

These files grow based on logins. I doubt you want to restrict those. ;-)
You need to archive these files elsewhere and reset the EOF when they grow big.
I.e. you need to create a crontab script to do this. Or tell you to do it manually.

Actually, I could care less. This is a test system in my Lab. If I can simplify the management of this thing, so much the better. Having to learn HP-UX on the fly has been interesting to say the least. If you have any suggestions how to stop/limit the size, awesome! The interesting thing as mentioned previously was that it was files with an "s" on the end that were large. Not the primary files. How did they get an "s"? I suppose if this happens automatically (once weekly, etc...), I could probably learn how to create a CRON task on HP-UX.
Thanks!!!

Re: HP-UX slow login (wtmps)

Dennis Handly — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 23:48:56 GMT

>This is a test system in my Lab. If you have any suggestions how to stop/limit the size

You can only reset it. Or turn it off altogether.

>The interesting thing as mentioned previously was that it was files with an "s" on the end that were large. Not the primary files.

You have backwards. The *s files are the main ones. The vanilla ones are vestigial. And I don't think the *x ones are used much either.

>I suppose if this happens automatically (once weekly, etc...), I could probably learn how to create a CRON task on HP-UX.

It's pretty simple, in a file have:

00 00 01 * * path-to-script script parms

(Or add to an existing crontab.)

This says run the script path-to-script once a month on the first.

And in your script:

#!/usr/bin/sh

# Reset EOF of wtmps, see crontab entry

> /var/adm/wtmps

Re: HP-UX slow login (wtmps)

HPUX-newbie — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:23:33 GMT

@Dennis Handly wrote:

It's pretty simple, in a file have:
00 00 01 * * path-to-script script parms

(Or add to an existing crontab.)

This says run the script path-to-script once a month on the first.

And in your script:
#!/usr/bin/sh
# Reset EOF of wtmps, see crontab entry
> /var/adm/wtmps

Whoops!!! I deleted those files thinking they were archive. :-) If I want to completely disable, how does one do that? The other thing I'm worried about with CRON jobs is that I have multiple OS'es per system. In other words, I have a RISC and an IA-64 system with 11 v1, v2, and v3, on different drives for testing. A CRON job could cause problems when a not loaded version needs to run it.

Honestly, I think it'd be best to shut it off unless it will have an adverse effect on the server.

Thanks for the guidance/advice!!!

Re: HP-UX slow login (wtmps)

Dennis Handly — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:06:21 GMT

>If I want to completely disable, how does one do that?

See wtmps(4):

Note that wtmps and btmps tend to grow without bound, and should be checked regularly. ... if these files are
removed, login record-keeping is turned off.

(I wouldn't remove btmps(4), since it maintains a record of bad logins. And hopefully small.)

>The other thing I'm worried about with CRON jobs is that I have multiple OS'es per system. In other words, I have a RISC and an IA-64 system with 11 v1, v2, and v3, on different drives for testing.

crontab files go with the root disk so can't have multiple OS versions. But you will have to stop yourself from executing crontab on that file if you are on the wrong system. You of course can add a check in the script to ignore the resetting of the EOF if not on the "right" system.

>I think it'd be best to shut it off unless it will have an adverse effect on the server.

Of you don't need to worry about accounting, security or use last(1) for triage or forensic purposes, you don't need it.