Users unable to login

[Simon R Wootton]

Had a situation a couple of times recently where users were unable to login, but then the problem went away. Initially thought it was a failed inetd daemon, but on closer inspection we found that users could login when others logged out. I'm focussing on the maxuprc kernal parameter for max user processes, would this be correct or should I be looking elsewhere ?

Points waiting!

Rgds
Simon

[Pete Randall]

Simon,

The parameter that immediately comes to my mind would be maxusers, though maxuprc and nproc are possibilities as well. Do you have Glance installed? If so, the system tables report can help you identify which of these you're bumping into.


Pete

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,


ps -ef | grep username | wc -l

If it exceeds maxuprc, then thats the culprit.

A quick look at /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log might help.

It could be nfiles or nproc or a number of other parameters in the kernel. I'd open up glance and look at the highwater mark display.

An intermittant problem like this can also be caused by a host coming up on the network with the same IP address. That should be checked. Shut down the system when this happens and try pinging it. If you get an answer its a problem.

SEP

[Bill Hassell]

> ...users were unable to login...

That's pretty vague. Did the failed logins get a login prompt? How about a password prompt? Then what was on the screen after that? What is in syslog at that time? There are a multitude of reasons, most of which can be identified given an error message.

maxuprc is not likely a problem unless people are using a shared login (a bad sysadmin practice). If you have error messages on the console (you do have a console, right?) about running out of pty's then you'll need to double the 3 kernel parameters npty, nstrtel and nstrpty.

[Simon R Wootton]

More info :

Users are getting the following error message :
------------------------------------------------------
telnetd: Telnet device drivers missing: No such device



In syslog.log, I'm seeing :
---------------------------
May 16 19:13:02 rp7410 telnetd[10868]: Fatal error: Telnet device drivers missin
g: No such device.
May 16 19:13:04 rp7410 telnetd[10968]: Fatal error: Telnet device drivers missing: No such device.
May 16 19:14:16 rp7410 telnetd[13822]: Fatal error: Telnet device drivers missing: No such device.
May 16 19:15:25 rp7410 telnetd[16170]: Fatal error: Telnet device drivers missing: No such device.
May 16 19:38:18 rp7410 telnetd[6915]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 19:38:26 rp7410 telnetd[7242]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 19:38:31 rp7410 telnetd[7458]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 21:26:38 rp7410 telnetd[4581]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 22:03:00 rp7410 telnetd[26161]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 22:03:07 rp7410 telnetd[26542]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 16 22:03:13 rp7410 telnetd[26742]: getpid: peer died: Error 0
May 17 00:20:54 rp7410 telnetd[7007]: Time out occurred in the initial option n
egotiation
May 17 07:17:29 rp7410 ftpd[14225]: exiting on signal 14
May 17 07:52:00 rp7410 ftpd[18951]: exiting on signal 14
May 17 09:37:57 rp7410 ftpd[23897]: exiting on signal 14
May 17 10:18:12 rp7410 ftpd[16008]: exiting on signal 14
May 17 12:39:22 rp7410 ftpd[27606]: exiting on signal 14


Hope this helps narrow down the causes, apologies for initial confusion.

Rgds
Simon

[Andrew Merritt_2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Simon,

This usually means that you need to increase the value for the kernel parameter "nstrtel"; you can do this in SAM. There should be at least as many nstrtel entries as the maximum number of xterm sessions plus further allowance for any other inbound telnet connections.

Andrew

[Ivan Krastev]

Check this kernel parameter - http://www.docs.hp.com/en/B3921-90010/nstrtel.5.html

See this previous thread how to deal with that error - http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=988543


regards,
ivan

[Simon R Wootton]

Increased nstrtel kernel parameter and all seems well so far ...

Many thanks to all of you for help.

Regards
Simon