Slow 'su' to users other than root

[cgswong]

Hi all,

I have noticed that over the last week, using 'su' to change to any user other than root is very slow taking up to 60 secs. while a su to root takes the normal few seconds. This did not use to be the case but I can not remember what has changed since.

It is not necessarily the su that takes long just the login part after the password is entered. Also telnet to the server takes quite a while as well to come up with a login prompt. Please help as this is very strange and I'm at a lost.

Thanks.

 

[xkjdhdg]

I would check /tmp..->/var/tmp to see if there is any excessly large files in there.
rm 1????? 2???? and etc. aaa etc. W??AAA files
look at /var do a du and see if anything large. sadm will be large you may
want to do each directory. Have you loaded patches lately?
In /var/adm you can take all of the messages files but the current one.
look at the wtmp wtmpx file in adm and all of the logs.
They must be clean out from time to time.

 

[cgswong]

All logs and the directories you specified are okay. So huge directory usage or anything like that. Any other ideas?

 

[bluedevils]

just a guess, but if only root works properly then one of the differences is home directory.

root dumps onto / while the rest start somewhere on the /export/home mount. try making a usr with a home directory not on that mount.

 

[trunix]

Are you using Automounter for home directories ?
Maybe Automounter needs killing and restarting.

 

[cgswong]

I upgraded to Solaris 8 (it was scheduled) and it seems to have solved the problem. Don't know how or why but it was fixed.

If anyone would like to put forward another idea please feel free. The problem might reoccur and I'll need those suggestions.

Thanks and regards.

 

[kanchanw]

IS your system networked? I guess this is NFS issue. And Solaris 8 is lot better to handle these requests.

 

[cgswong]

Problem has returned and this time I know we didn't change anything. We have a mounted NFS share from another machine so I'll umount it and get back as to if this resolved it.

Thanks all.

 

[trunix]

Are your home directories mounted from another server ?
Try nfsstat to see if there are any nfs / network problems.