pwgrd daemon

[Dewa Negara_4]

Hi All,

I am running a script which change shell some userID /etc/passwd. When the script is running, I noticed pwgrd daemon got hang. Could you pls help the following items :

1. What is pwgrd for?
2. What happen if the daemon is not running on a server?
3. Is it fine if I just stop prgrd and start it again after the script finished?

Pls help. High score will be given.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Negara

[Sundar_7 · Accepted solution]

Hi Negara,

pwgrd is the password and group caching daemon - it is used to improve the speed withwhich users are authenticated if the password and group information is unusually large.

As fas as I know, it is not going to have any impact in the system as long as your password and group is not very huge.

How did you find out pwgrd is hung ? - There should be no need to stop and restart pwgrd.

Sundar

[Michael Tully]

What is in the script that makes you take note of the daemon? daemons don't hang for no apparent reason.

[Bill Hassell]

There have been several patches to pwgrd. From the PHCO_30243 patch text:

"pwgrd(1M) is intermittently consuming CPU time and not responding to the requests."

which was actually fixed back in PHCO_28007. (these are 11.11 patches, see PHCO_28563 for 11.00 and the same problem)

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

I just ran into a problem with the pwgrd not running... If you use NIS and you don't have pwgrd running, /sbin/chown won't work.

Big deal, you say? Yes, it's a big deal, because /sbin/chown is called from a lot of our scripts in SD packages, since /sbin is a primary path (apparently)... Probably because in /sbin/init.d/swagentd PATH is set to /sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

We just ran into this this morning, so I'm still looking for a solution/workaround...

P.S.: we stopped the pwgrd, because NIS updates were not correctly visible if we had this daemon running. Have it run again is no solution.