Not prompting for password

[frnddev]

Hi m using Hp unix 11iV2 os. The problem is that in the shell login prompt ,after  i give the username it does not prompt for password. I am not able to login. Kindly help,what can be the root cause of problem how can it be sorted out?

Is it related in any way to DNS server but i am using IP address only.

[Matti_Kurkela]

Exactly how are you logging in? From the console? If over the network, which protocol are you using (ssh, remsh, telnet, other)? Try logging in from the console, if possible.

If even the console is failing in this way, it might mean the system is seriously overloaded and cannot start any more processes (on the console, the "getty" process is already running to present the login prompt, but it fails to start up "login" for prompting the password and processing the login). In that situation, you should wait a bit to see if the system is just slow to respond because of overloading: if no password prompt appears on the console within a minute or two, the only recourse might be to crash/TOC the system. If properly configured, the system should create a crash dump you can use later to examine the system state at the point of the crash, or you can send the crash dump files to HP for a deeper analysis if you have a support contract.

If the problem was caused by resource exhaustion (out of memory/swap? process table full?) then analyzing the crash dump should allow you to identify the misbehaving program.

Other possible reasons might be disk failure(s), other type of hardware failure, or a sysadmin mistake (e.g. "oops, accidentally deleted/renamed /lib/libc.*"). These will usually become more obvious when you attempt to reboot the server and/or check the system log (after a successful reboot, see /var/adm/syslog/OLDsyslog.log). A kernel/driver bug is possible, although fairly unlikely in a mature OS version like 11iv2 (is your system up to date with patches?).

[rmueller58]

Sounds as if the root filesystem full.. 

If you can log in on a console, do so. do a  bdf. or df and check the file system.

I've had the rootFS get full and not allow log in via 

clean up, check for remote mounted file systems where something is writes to remote but the mount is not in fact mounted.