telnet and rlogin error

[Leon Stevens]

I have a B1000 workstation running 10.20 with the following error when attempting to login,

No utmp entry.You must exec "login" from the lowest level "sh".

Tanks in advance for any help

Leon

[James R. Ferguson]

Leon:

The utmp file is corrupt or missing.

Rebooting will always cause this file to be recreated, fixing the problem.

This is "drasitic", so if you, or someone, are logged-in you can remove the current file (if there) and touch /etc/utmp. Then change the permissions to -rw-rw-rw and this should correct the problem.

If this isn't possible (i.e. you are trying to login; can't; and no one else is logged-in; then follow the steps in document #KBRC00000660.

...JRF...

[Insu Kim]

The /etc/utmp file contains current login staus and this may be caused by corrupted or missed utmp file.

If you can't logon to the system at all,
The best way of cleaning this situation up is to reboot the system. at bootup, this file is recreated by the kernel automatically.

If you can logon,
To fix the corrupted entries only, /usr/sbin/acct/fwtmp would be useful, refer to man page.
To clean utmp,
# > /etc/utmp

[Manju Kampli]

The /etc/utmp file which contains the current login status
and other system information is corrupt or has been removed.
To clean this situation up, the system must be rebooted. At boot
time, this file gets created with the correct information by the kernel.

[Vincente Fernandes]

1. First of all is our workstation accessible on the network? If yes then try to ftp to the workstation with uid "root" go to "/etc" dir and upload a 0(zero) byte "utmp" file from the PC where you have ftped. Make sure that the file size is zero, log out of ftp and you should be able to login successfully.
2. Otherwise the simple solution is to powercycle the worksation. 3rd option see if you can TOC(transfer of control - not sure whether it can be done on a workstation) workstation.