No utmp entry

[Larry Le]

Occasionally, I try logon another node with rlogin, I got the message,

No utmp entry. You must exec "login" from the lowest level "sh".
Connection closed.

The temporary fix that I've been doing is to NFS mount to the node and remove the /etc/utmp file. Then it let me rlogin again.

TIA.

--Larry

[Rick Garland]

In the /etc directory is where the utmp file would reside. Do a touch utmp and have perms set to 644 root-root.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

File utmp contains a record of all users logged onto the system. You have to update $HOME/.rhosts on the system with your user name and check if your ip address has permission to use rlogin and remsh in /var/adm/inetd.sec.

[Brad Marks]

I had the same problem with hard (modem)ports
on my k420 and found that entries in /etc/inittab like to have a 4-character id (first entry on a line). Verify that the entries are, indeed, four bytes. I had to change "a4" to "a004".

[zhaogui]

Yes, it can work. Thank you for your quick response and assistance. But I was wondering what "init q" actually do and it seems it did not reboot the machine and just reread /etc/inittab, similar to "inetd -c" which reread /etc/inetd.conf.

Just curious, how come this can happen? What is the root cause?

[S.K. Chan]

# mv /etc/utmp /etc/utmp.bad
# touch /etc/utmp
# vi /etc/inittab
==> change the line that has
cons:123456:respawn ....
to
cons:123456:off .....
# init q
# vi /etc/inittab
==> change the previous line that you've edit back to what it was before ..
cons:123456:respawn ...
# init q

[Frank Slootweg]

Next time, before removing it, try to find out what is wrong with /etc/utmp. You can use fwtmp(1M) to convert it to ASCII text (i.e. "/usr/sbin/acct/fwtmp /etc/utmp").

Most of the time it is some kind of 'login' program, i.e. also X-servers and stuff, which corrupts the /etc/utmp file.

[pap]

1. nfs mount the root directory from the remote machine.

2. edit the file /.rhosts and put your machine name in that file.

Now do rlogin to login to that machine.you should be fine then.
Otherwise check for any restriction in /var/adm/inetd.sec file.

Thanks,
pap

[T. M. Louah]

.: check the following K/B docs:
AUSRCKBRC00000726
KBRC00006851

.: Check the following discussions :
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/0,,0x637f37f45ef7d4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x09f3a14d9abcd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html


http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xf1b653921f1ad5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

Remember PAP (a.k.a Pliz assign points!)