CDE / X problems

[Dril-Quip]

Guys,
I have a strange problem here...I have a few 735's and a few C240's that are failing to open CDE or X sessions. There are no errors, or messages in the syslogs for either client or servers. I can rlogin to a few of the machines that are having this problem, and I can ping the server with no problems. I can login to the server and ping with workstations no problem.

I've tried restarting NIS, NFS on the servers and clients with no change.

All the users share profiles etc, which is on an NFS directory stored on the server.

If i log in as root to the CDE it comes up no problem.

The .profile has not changed for months.


Any clues to this riddle would be appreciated :)

Cheers,

Steve Buchan

[Corthouts Carlo]

Are you using DNS?

[Dril-Quip]

No DNS, the hostname lookup is all handled by NIS.

[Alex Glennie]

Sharing profiles ....anything else they share like $HOME dirs ?

I'd run dr_dt in case this is just a permissions problem.

Could the perms on the mount point be a problem ?

What O/S and shell are the users using ? if ksh try creating a history file locally as opposed to on the mount point ?

also what happens if you create a non root user locally on the system.

Lastly can NFS users login via a failsafe CDE session ? Check /var/dt/Xerrors and $HOME/.dt/startlog - consider ading set -x to .dtprofile first though if you want more info outputted.

[Dril-Quip]

all the users have seperate home areas, although the dtwmrc file, .Xdefaults, .profile are all shared.

The mount point permissions are all fine.

The OS is 11.00 on server and workstations, and yes it is ksh that the users use.


A non-root local user account suffers from the same symptoms as a NIS user.

A Fail safe session appears to work normaly (this just opens a shell window??)

There are no errors in $HOME/.dt/startlog

There is an error in /var/dt/Xerrors however:

error (pid 1593): Server for display ukux7:0 terminated unexpectedly 0

The time of this error coincides with attempted log ins.

Cheers,

Steve

[Alex Glennie]

can you interrogate files before DNS via /etc/nsswitch.conf and feedback with the results ?

ie use /etc/hosts before using DNS : check with nslookup

also look at the dr_dt output .... not too sure where the problem lies just yet .....

[Dril-Quip]

hmm...i got 1 machine going by making the following changes:

rcp'd the alias file from the NIS server to local /etc/hosts, changed nsswitch.conf to check files, then nis. (No DNS running on these systems),
i also noticed the IP in resolv.conf was wrong, so I corrected this.


Now I just have to figure out how to get into the other workstations to make these changes...

Cheers,

Steve

[Dril-Quip]

oops...not the alias file I rcp'd..I meant hosts file.

[K.Vijayaragavan.]

Hi ,

My understanding is that you are able to get X windows as root but not with other users.

Please check the file permissions for the file /etc/hosts. It must have read access permitted to group and others.

aleast it's permission should be "rwxr--r--".

use the below mentioned commands to change the permissions:
#chmod g+r,o+r /etc/hosts
or
#chmod 744 /etc/hosts

regards
vijay

[Peter Eisentraeger]

I had the same symptoms when I edited /etc/dt/config/Xstartup.

No errors, no logs but no CDE/X Session. But a typo in this script was the cause.

Did You change there anything?

[K.Vijayaragavan.]

Hi,
Make sure the NIS escape entry is there in all the /etc/hosts file on the clients incase if all these workstations are NIS clients.

Vijay

[K.Vijayaragavan.]

Hi,

In some cases if the /home filesystem is full 100% utilized than also normal users will not be able to login using CDE.
But root is a exception case.

-Vijay

[Steve Steel]

Hi

1)What is in /var/dt/Xerrors

2)Run /usr/contrib/bin/X11/dr_dt

3)Start a font server

Steve Steel


CDE includes a small set of fonts and font aliases which are not
part of the standard MIT X distribution. In order for CDE to
function correctly, these fonts must be made available to
X-servers (X-Terminals) displaying CDE.

- ------------------------------------------------------
The simple solution to this problem involves configuring and
running a font-server on the system which is running CDE and
forcing the font server into the X-Server (X-Terminal) font-path.

To do this a few things are required:

1 - The font server needs to be configured to include the CDE
fonts in its catalog

EDIT: /etc/X11/fs/config

Append ",/usr/dt/config/xfonts/C" to the end of the
"catalogue = ..." line

EDIT: /etc/rc.config.d/xfs

Set the following variable: "RUN_X_FONT_SERVER=1"

EXECUTE: /sbin/init.d/xfs start

If the font-server is already running, kill it and
restart it.

2 - Force CDE to add the font-server to the X-Server font-path
by editing the Xsetup file. (NOTE: This steps REQUIRES
the IP address of the CDE session server. You can get
this information by running: nslookup `hostname`.)

COPY: /usr/dt/config/Xsetup to /etc/dt/config/Xsetup
EDIT: /etc/dt/config/Xsetup

Add the following line to /etc/dt/config/Xsetup replacing
"IPADDRESS" with the IP address of the server as returned
from "nslookup `hostname`":

$XDIR/xset fp+ tcp/IPADDRESS:7000 1>/dev/null

- -------------------------------------------------------------
G) FURTHER READING
- ------------------------------------------------------
Man pages: xfs(1), dtlogin(1)
- -------------------------------------------------------------