question about login

[navin]

Hi ,
One of my hp server L2000 - recently became very slow - it is intermittent.logins take much time - resource utilization looks ok.what could be wrong
thanks

[Mel Burslan]

DNS ???

check the /etc/resolv.conf file and make sure all the dns servers listed in this file, especially the first one, is accessible from this server. The most common problem of slow logins is generally associated with some DNS server issue.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

If you mean that a login takes a long time to complete; i.e. from the time you say 'telnet' or 'ssh' to the time you receive a response, then perhaps your DNS reverse lookup is defective.

See if adding the IP address of the device from which you try to login to the server's '/etc/hosts'. You can name the client device anything you want for this purpose. If you do this, does the delay disappear? If so, you have a mis-configured DNS server.

Regards!

...JRF...

[navin]

Thank you , along with slow login..it takes much time for commands like vi..that is also intermittent
thanks

[navin]

Also i'm getting mail: permission denied! error once i logged in
thanks

[Mel Burslan]

The symptoms you have listed may have many reasons, one of which someone, stupidly, making a sweeping ownership/permission change on one of the directories which should be world readable. Check your directory and file level permissions and ownerships on /home /usr /var /opt /tmp /etc and compere them to another hpux server which does not have this problem.

But this only addresses the slow response after you login. DNS issue still stands.

[navin]

if i type mail - i get permission denied
and some commands takes much time to respond - some times not.

[Mel Burslan]

do you have root capability on this server ? Or these problems are taking place only when you login as a regular user ?

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

I agree with Mel -- you seem to have a multitude of issues.

> if i type mail - i get permission denied

Then (as root) look at the permissions and ownership of '/var/mail'. It should look like:

# ls -dl /var/mail
drwxrwxr-x 2 bin mail 96 May 13 17:16 /var/mail

...with individual files showing like:

-rw-rw---- 1 root mail 3705 Apr 28 10:36 root
-rw-rw---- 1 navin mail 3333 May 12 17:00 navin


Regards!

...JRF...

[Matti_Kurkela]

One of the many possible things with those symptoms is a disk about to die. If you are using MirrorDisk, maybe one disk of the mirror pair has already failed and the second one is now failing too - a bad situation.

Intermittent delays might indicate the (remaining?) disk requires multiple retries to succeed in read/write operations in some parts of the disk. If the disk really behaves like this, it is probably in very bad shape and could fail totally at any moment.

Your first priority should be to ensure that your backups are OK. Don't overwrite any old backups to create new ones - you may need to recover some files from older backups if they are already unreadable on the system.

For diagnosing and fixing disk failures, please read this document:

http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-1236/When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf

MK