SUMMARY: weird utmpx problem

From: rahul sen (rahul_sen@hotvoice.com)
Date: Mon Oct 09 2000 - 16:05:11 CDT


My original post:

>At various times (no observed pattern) on various OS levels (2.5/6/7) and various
>h/w platforms (220/420/250/e1000) the following message appears when a user tries
>to telnet/rlogin or sometimes just with telnet (rlogin works) and the login attempt
>fails.
>
>**message starts**
>
>Cannot create utmpx entry. You must exec "login" from the lowest level "shell".
>
>**messge ends**
>
>SUN cannot provide any solution(!). The only solution seems to be to zero out /var/adm/utmpx
>in single-user mode. But obviously its a very irritating proposition for 24x7 production
>machines.
>
>Any solution/insight will be appreciated. Will summarize.
>

The following people provided helpful insight (apologize if i left someone out) :

*************************
suri@mtcts1.ho.lucent.com (Was kind enough to send me a script to safely truncate
/var/adm/wtmp and /var/adm/wtmpx)
Paul Hedgepeth <hedgepethp@yahoo.com>
"Stuart, Reggie (GXS, Maxim)" <Reggie.Stuart@gxs.ge.com>
 James Ranks <ranks@avnasis.jccbi.gov>
Jarrett Carver <solarboyz1@hotmail.com
Casper Dik <Casper.Dik@holland.sun.com>
*************************

Reasons: Basically all the replies point towards one or more of the following reasons:
1)Some application (like acct or some third party app) writing to utmpx and corrupting
it.
2)/var filling up. Also possible due to wtmp and wtmpx files growing in size.
3)Some inconsistency with user-ids causing utmpx to get corrupted. (suggested by
Reggie Stuart)
4)Some customization error in the syslogd files. (suggested by Reggie Stuart)

Solution: In my case i have verified and can definitely rule out reasons 1,2 and
4 . I still have to investigate reason 3 since we have a user database of more than
8000 users and there is possibility of inconsistent user ids. Also we have multiple
usernames with the same user id of 0 (for root access) and that might very well
be the cause of the problem.

Thanks for ur help guys.

Rahul Sen

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