cannot fork: no swap space.. cannot do a thing only logged in.

[antix]

Hello,

I have a customers system that got this error they rebooted and I just am able to login. I can cd but cannot run anything, cannot even ls.. What can we do?

Thanks Scott

 

[Chapter11]

You will need to boot the machine into maintenance mode and correct the paging space problems there. how you get there depends on your model, the easiest way is to pop cd1 in, and boot from that, then instead of installing, get to a command prompt with rootvg on and filesystems enabled.

After that, troubleshooting paging space =) I hope you know AIX!

(sorry, with the machine in the state you describe, you're not going to be able to cleanly shut it down - on the flip side, it's likely nothing that could be corrupted by an improper shutdown started up in the first place).

 

[antix]

Yeah.. I have decided to try and boot fromtape due to the fact that they don't have a CD... aaack. I don't know if it will go.. but I am trying. I am remote to this machine and working with very non-tech people and me... I am more used to SCO...

 

[Chapter11]

Unless their console is plugged into a modem, or terminal server (not the windows product), you are not going to be able to resolve the problem remotely.

 

[antix]

Well I got it to boot up and watched paging space as it went like this.

Page Space Physical Volume Volume Group Size %Used Active Auto Type
paging00 hdisk1 datavg 128MB 66 yes yes lv
hd6 hdisk0 rootvg 160MB 57 yes yes lv

Page Space Physical Volume Volume Group Size %Used Active Auto Type
paging00 hdisk1 datavg 128MB 82 yes yes lv
hd6 hdisk0 rootvg 160MB 69 yes yes lv

Page Space Physical Volume Volume Group Size %Used Active Auto Type
paging00 hdisk1 datavg 128MB 87 yes yes lv
hd6 hdisk0 rootvg 160MB 74 yes yes lv

User said she printed some invoices

 

[antix]

Heh... got it... It kept coming back up to multi-user so I decided to keep digging. I cleared the /var/adm/wtmp file and found this is what was thrashing my memory so. Why? hmm.. dunno. Then went through, and cleared thousands of mail files from the /var/spool/mqueue dropped the paging down from a height 0f 87% to a norm of 8%.

And dropped /var/spool from 99% to 9%... whew.. what a tricky hour..

thanks.. Scott