.profile does not end.....????

[Chuck Lackey]

Here's a good one for you. I have a K380 on which all user home directories reside. There are multiple J2240 machines being used as multi-user, network accessible development sandboxes. The users access the J-boxes via TCP/IP rlogin using Hummingbird PC.
The filesystem holding the home directories on the K380 is NFS mounted to the J-boxes. Occassionally (like after a J-box reboot), the users logging in will not get a prompt after completion of their .profile. This only happens with users whose home directories are NFS mounted. Others, such as root, etc. complete and present a prompt as they should. With the others, the .profile completes, but never exits. Once it hangs, you can break out with a control-c, but you only get that far if you telnet or rlogin from a working window to another machine. Using the rlogin from Hummingbird times out and gives you an error screen.
I know we should be using automount and that this would probably solve the problem, but that decision is not mine. I need to fix this maddening situation with the parameters as they are, if possible.
The K380 is on HP-UX 11.00. Some of the J-boxes are 10.20 and some are 11.00. Both exhibit the symptom.
Sometimes, after a few days, the problem disappears. Sometimes, it lasts for weeks.
Well....whad'ya think??? Hmmmmm???

[Robert Gamble]

Can you display in this forum a sample user .profile ?

[Steve Sauve]

Having not seen the profile this is a bit of a shot in the dark, but the profile may be calling something that should be mounted. You could put in some if/then logic before the statement to check for the directory/file first.
if /bin/test -f
then

else
exit
fi

Or something to that effect...I believe -d checks for directories.

Just a thought,
Steve

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Chuck,

had sth like this a few months ago and tracked it down to that .profile did not matter - the nasty beast I've been after was $HISTFILE.

A situation that I encounter if users $HOME is nfs-mounted. Everything was fine after I've added in .profile a $HISTFILE in a locally mounted filesystem, eg "export HISTFILE=/tmp/.$LOGNAME.sh_history"

Good luck,
Thomas

[Chuck Lackey]

Thank you, Thomas Brix. That takes care of the problem, though there is still an underlying problem in that this is intermittent.

Thanks to all for your responses. I guess I wasn't clear in my question that I knew the problem was not the .profile itself. I knew that it completed and whatever was hanging was something between the end of .profile and the beginning of display of $PS1.

Now if I can get an answer from HP of how to address this without the work around provided by Thomas.

This forum stuff is great!!