system will not boot correctly

[intern06]

First of all, I am exremely new and unfamiliar with HP-UX so I apologize if any of this is confusing. I'm just trying to get this system to run again.

I am intern at a company with an HP visualize C160 running HP-UX B.10.20. It has stopped booting to the gui and, after some coaxing, will end up at a text-based menu screen but virtually nothing can be run from there.

At first the computer ran through it's boot process then stopped at this message:

Start NFS client subsystem&&&&&&&&&[ ]

It alternates between busy and wait then goes ot the following message

NFS server (pid1509@/net) not responding still trying systems

It never leaves this message until I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del which brings it to a text-based login and then to a text-based menu screen.

Once I login I receive the following message repeated at least 9 times:

Warning! One or more of your selected locales are not available. Plese invoke the commands "lovale" and "locale -a" to verify your selections and the available locales.
Continuing processing using the "C" locale.

I actually proceeded to run locale and this is the message it returned:
LANG=n-compuer
LC_CTYPE= C
LC_COLLATE= C
LC_MONETARY= C
LC_NUMERIC= C
LC_TIME= C
LC_MESSAGES= C
LC_ALL=


After going through all this, I went into SAM and disable the NFS client and rebooted. Upon reaching the checklist for booting, it passed the NFS client this time but failed on the following two:

Start NCS broker daemons.................[FAIL]
Starting HP Distributed Print Services...[FAIL]

It continues to boot and almost makes it to the GUI Desktop Login screen, but it never makes it the whole way and ends up returning me

Any help would be EXTREMELY appreciated since I and everyone at my company are completely clueless about how to proceed.

Thanks!

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

A hang at this stage is most likely a networking issue.

Has networking on your network changed?

Is /etc/rc.config.d/netconf been changed.

Find out what networking should be and run this script from the command line:

set_parms

Another possible cause is simply that the NFS server you are trying to connect with is offline. The reason I don't think its this is because if you waited long enough the NFS client should fail and the boot should proceed normally.

Another network issue possible is another device is on the network with the same IP address. Shut off your box and ping your IP address. If you get an answer, talk to networking.

SEP

[intern06]

The computer is not on the network so although I agree that it seems like a networking issue, it can't be.

How do I check if /etc/rc.config.d/netconf has been changed and how do I know if it's been changed?

I let the computer try and boot overnight with this NFS server still enabled and I came back this morning to a computer with a black screen and nothing else so it unfortunately will not eventually fail and the boot proceed normally.

Also, why does it still not boot even when I disable the NFS client since it really is not needed without any networking.

I'm really very confused and also do not understand unix, so please help me if you can.

[intern06]

It has been suggested to me in a different forum that I boot the computer in single user, root user mode and then uncomment the file /etc/auto_master.

Do you think this would work and, if you do think it would, could you please explain to me how I would uncomment the file? I know how to boot into the correct user mode.

[Andrew Rutter]

hi,

it really does sound likely to be network related, was the workstation ever on a network?

it might be an idea to try and reconfigure all the local and network from scratch again.

login as as root to the command line(textbase) and issue this command to reconfigure.
#set_parms initial

This will allow you to set or keep the old settings for hostname, ip network parameters and timezone/localization.
This will also update the necessary networking files also for you.

I dont know what effect commenting the line out you mention, but to do so you would simply put a # sign at the beginning of the line. You would need to edit the file with a text editor like vi.

Andy

[intern06]

It would appear that this computer once was on a network. It has never been on a network since the company was bought though.

I just had one question. If I intend on trying to ftp the files on this system off of it, would messing around with the network settings cause a problem? It seems like every time I adjust a networking connection, my computer goes haywire.

I have recently tried turning off the automount feature and it resulted in the boot procedure continuing until the desktop login screen, but gave me that continuous loop backwards described earlier. It comes on with the background and an X cursor then goes back to text and repeats this until I tell it to stop and login with commands. When I login with commands, that's when I get the warning about locales.

[melvyn burnard]

As this is HP-UX 10.20 (unsupported OS by the way) it needs to see a network link operational for things like CDE, etc.
You could install a T-Piece and two terminators on the LAN card (if it has a BNC connection, or connect it to a network siwtch port that ii not used, and this should help
You could also make sure DNS is disabled, and that the hostname/ip address pair is correct in the /etc/hosts file.

[intern06]

I honestly appreciate the help, but I don't know what you just said. I have ZERO experience with unix and am very confused.

If it helps, the c160 is connected to an emulex performance 2500 via an ieee 802.3 microtransciever.