Timeout starting ksh shell

[Jan Meijer]

On a HP-UX 11.) system, homedirectorys are mounted using NFS. When a non-root user logs in (with his homedir on the NFS-mounted /home filesystem), the logon takes several minutes. The .profile file, also residing on /home, is sourced almost immediately, so the /home filesystem is available and fast. By putting in echos it is clear that the whole .profile is finished, but no shell is started (no prompt).
When the user eventually is logged in, it again takes a few minutes to start a new ksh-shell.
Any suggestions?

[Wodisch_1]

Hi Jan,

I do remember a lot of problems with locking the history files!
Can you store those (temporarily) on a local filesystem to check wether it is faster then?
If yes, the solution were some NFS patches (fixing something in rpc.lockd and rpc.statd)...

HTH,
Wodisch

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Jan,

I've seen this symptom on systems where the /etc/profile is running a
who -T
in it which needs nslookups (both directions) working properly to all logged in systems.
What causes the delay is the DNS timeout(s) when the hostnames cannot be resolved or the IPs cannot be reverse resolved.

You can test this by manually running who -T & watching how long it takes to complete, or by commenting out the who -T in the /etc/profile (or in .profile if it's in there).
All who -T does is determine if the tty can be written to by wall or whatever.

To solve this properly - ALL systems that access the server should be in DNS & in there properly so that reverse lookups are correct as well.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Jan,

I ran into this before. It has something to do with the shell itself. Change the user's shell to /usr/bin/csh and login to the workstation again. This should take no time at all to login. Search for lastest cumulative patch for ksh and apply.

Hai

[Rita C Workman]

Well if your folks are having a timedelay to login than I would suspect it is as was mentioned above....resolving who is logging in so that the K box doesn't wait looking around because the nsswitch.conf said check hosts then DNS....

There are two ways to fix this so the enduser gets the login prompt quickly.
1. Add an entry in your named.boot for the IP...name is irrelavent, as long as it is unique, call them anything as long as the IP is there.
2. Add an entry in your hostfile for the IP....again name is irrelavent, as long as it is unique.

Hope that addresses your first issue at least,
Rita

[Jan Meijer]

Installing NFS patches solved the problem.

Thanks for your help!

[James Ding]

I have the same problem. Could you please give me the patch ID?

Thanks