SAM "parse error" on startup

[Jeremy Hyllberg]

On one of our HP systems, our operations staff needs to access the SAM management tool for resetting of account passwords. We recently setup two new operator accounts, and copied the profile settings from another existing operator account.

The problem is, when they try to run SAM, they get the following error:

$ /usr/sbin/sam
A "parse" operation failed while accessing the SAM preferences file.
The return code was 3.

I've never seen this before, and am not real sure where to look for a fix. Any help would be awesome. Thanks!

-- Jeremy

[Cheryl Griffin · Accepted solution]

There should be a /var/sam/preferences directory. Does it exist? Check owner, group and permissions as well.

[Ray Brewer]

You may look in "/var/sam/preferences" to see if there is some sort of permissions problem.

Ray

[Cheryl Griffin]

Also see if SAM checks out:
# swverify -v SystemAdmin

[Jeremy Hyllberg]

These are the permissions in the preferences directory (the dir itself has 555 perms):

# pwd
/var/sam/preferences
# ls -l
total 4
-rw------- 1 root sys 73 Apr 29 2003 app_preference
-r--r--r-- 1 bin bin 886 Oct 27 1997 dg.config

It's interesting, because if I try the exact same thing from any but these two operators' accounts, SAM works fine. I figure it must be something within their environments - in .profile or something, but the configurations are identical across all operators.

-- Jeremy