/dev/root not showing in mount, crash every ~56 mins, No Shell HELP!!

[AJJJ]

Hi,

Yesterday about 11am, my SCO Openserver 5.0.5 throws everyone out of the system and they are unable to log back in, because when they do it gives them NO SHELL and drops back out. Also the last login date is garbage like "@#@#$%#%@8080934834@#!@#"

Root can login fine and use our company software, but something is up, when I type dfspace or mount, the /dev/root apears to not be mounted, but I can access it and use it fine (as root).

To fix this, I just reboot and the server works fine for about 56 minutes, then it drops out again and non roots users cant do anything.

Here are some pastes to show you what i mean:


NEW SERVER -> df -v
Mount Dir Filesystem blocks used free %used
/stand /dev/boot 80000 21110 58890 27%

NEW SERVER -> df -v
Mount Dir Filesystem blocks used free %used
/stand /dev/boot 80000 21110 58890 27%

NEW SERVER -> df -v /dev/root
Mount Dir Filesystem blocks used free %used
/dev/root 33376140 25092014 8284126 76%

Ive tried anything I could find in the newsgroups and sco forums with no luck, a few people seemed to have my problem but never said if they fixed it. I have run fsck and other utils all saying its fine.

One thing that may contribute I had a power failure 2 weeks ago in which the UPS died before it was supposed to. But everything worked fine up until now. Please help!!!

 

[piperent]

I've seen things like this before. They usually are the result of some executable being corrupted. One site in particular corrupted the 'sed' executable. This is a critical loss since most Unix scripts (from boot, to df, to cron scripts, and so-on) rely on the output of 'sed' to perform properly. The end result was that although the system booted, many of the commands would not function properly because they were relying on 'sed's' output. Once I replaced the program, everything was back to normal.

Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it. Since you experienced a hard shutdown recently, I would suggest digging into some of the command functions that seem to fail or function improperly (dfspace is a shell script that uses 'awk'). It's highly probable that you'll find something that has been clobbered. When you do, try replacing it with a good copy of that program or script.

The 56 minute thing may be tied to something in 'cron'. Check your crontabs for programs that run around that time. They may give you a clue where to look.

This should give you someplace to start. Good luck.