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

 
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Chuck Lackey
Advisor

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

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???
4 REPLIES 4
Robert Gamble
Respected Contributor

Re: .profile does not end.....????

Can you display in this forum a sample user .profile ?
Steve Sauve
Frequent Advisor

Re: .profile does not end.....????

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
Not applicable
Solution

Re: .profile does not end.....????

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
Advisor

Re: .profile does not end.....????

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!!