swinstall slow for users with _ in username

[Gordon McKinnon]

I ran into something unusual. I found that on HP-UX 11.11 swinstall runs significantly slower (~10 minutes vs 15 seconds) for users with a username containing an underscore (I used useradd to create test accounts). Does anyone know if this is normal, why it happens, and/or if there is a workaround (other than not using underscores in usernames)? Tusc shows a lot of gettimeofday calls but I was not able to find the root cause.

[Victor Fridyev · Accepted solution]

Hi
AFAIK, only root is permitted to use swlinstall. How do you permit to other users to install sw ?

[Gordon McKinnon]

Excuse me, swlist not swinstall.

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

I changed name for one of my users and don't see any change: the command works with the same speed. Do you see anything in

#>dmesg -
or in /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log ?

[Torsten.]

Does your user have a home directory?

What is your user management (/etc/passwd or NIS or ...)?
Did you logged on with this user or just "su"?

[Patrick Wallek]

I just created a user called test_use on one of my 11.11 systems.

I then ran swlist and saw no noticeable time lag. It completed very quickly.

Do you have all of the latest SW* patches installed?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Is this a trusted or untrusted system? Are you running NIS/NIS+/ or LDAP? Is the user's home directory local or remote with respect to this user. Are you running automounted home directories?

[Gordon McKinnon]

Responses to various questions:

-nothing related in dmesg or syslog
-I'm using /etc/passwd, no NIS on this server, dns only non-files entry in nsswitch.conf
-all the users I tested with have home directories
-I do not have the latest patches installed, on the particular server I've been testing with but I get the same behaviour on numberous servers. I will compare patch levels and explicitly check patch bulletins (tried general searches for HP and google before posting)
-I logged on directly with each user
-one of the users I used was tst_use, it was slow, tstuse user was not.
-Environments for users I tested with were identical (default for server with useradd).

[Gordon McKinnon]

-System is not trusted, standard HP-UX B.11.11. No LDAP, no NFS mounts
-Home directories are local

My setup is quite simple, and the problem surprised me. My analysis went nowhere, I found the problem by trial and error (user question: why is swlist so slow for user x_y?). On the other hand I haven't done much HP-UX in the last ~5 years so I may be missing something obvious.

[Victor Fridyev]

HI,

As a simple test try to replace _ with -
Look on /etc/profile. May be there is a test for usernames, which is not intended for ggg_fff structure.

It's really strange 8((((