getgrnam failed for$Enabling swap space [ OK ]

[girishb]

Hi,

Could anyone pls help me how to resolve with this kind of error?

getgrnam failed for$Enabling swap space

This always appear everytime I boot our Server installed with RHEL 3.0

Thanks for quick responses..

Girish

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

getgrnam is a C function used to look up group names from /etc/group

Why this would be used when enabling swap space, I don't know...

Is your swap space actually mounted ?
What does the output of :

swapon -s

give you ?

Maybe there's something wrong with the swap definition in /etc/fstab ...

Cheers,

Rob

[girishb]

Hi Rob,

swap space is not mounted. Here is the output you asked.

[root@server1 root]# swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda8 partition 8193108 0 -1
[root@server1 root]# cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults,ro 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/opt /opt ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
LABEL=/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2
/dev/sda8 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0

The Server is installed with 4 GB RAM and Swap Space is approx twice the RAM size.

Please suggest!!

Thanks
Girish

[Jerome Henry]

Hi Girish,

First, be aware that your issue is not an easy one. Something is preventing (not allowing) your swap to be mounted, that's something you already know, but we'll probably would need to carefully try to troubleshoot to find the culprit !
First : which kernel do you run ? If it's a 2.4.x flavour, do you use highmem ?
Then : have you looked closely at dmesg and /var/log/messages to track any suspicious problem related to this issue ? If you don't know how to read them, can you post the section surrounding swap ?
Then : have you tried to swapoff (well swap isn't started anyway), recreate it under fdisk and try to reload ?
8 GB is a huge amount of swap...what applications do you use to require this amount ? (just surprised here)

J

[Heironimus]

Swap space is never "mounted", that's not how it's used. Your swapon output shows ~8GB swap on sda8, so your swap is fine.

Something that the init scripts run is throwing that error. It's just getting printed on the same line as the output about swap. It could be from the same init script, or it could be from an earlier script.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

As mentioned above, your swap space looks fine. I don't see anything out of the ordinary in your fstab either.

As per the previous post you'll need to watch the console carefully as the server comes up to work out what's happening around the same time that as the Enabling swap space message gets printed. The error probably lies there...

Cheers,

Rob