su hangs

[xenia123]

hi all,

I've got a problem with su on Solaris 9. If I make a su, the Server hangs.. i can't do anything, but the server is still running. I have also an earlier problem, that there's an empty /var/adm/messages file since months.. I have no idea what I can do without root permissions.. Can somebody help me please?

Thank you in forward

greetings,
xenia123

 

[Annihilannic]

The server hangs? Or your session does? i.e. if you log in to another session, can you still do stuff?

Does it prompt you for a password before hanging?

What output does which su give?

Annihilannic.

 

[xenia123]

just the session hangs. it prompts me for the password after that, nothing happens after tiping the password. su is located in /usr/bin/su

 

[KenCunningham]

Is there anything on the console when this happens? Who's the system administrator with root access?

 

[Annihilannic]

Can you log in as root on the console?

Annihilannic.

 

[KenCunningham]

Is there anything in the su'ing user's .profile that might be causing the hanging?

 

[xenia123]

im the system administrator with root access.. i logged in as root over the console via a terminalserver and then tried to make a su on an other user.. the session still hangs.. but it is possible to attach a terminal.. would that be useful? i could kill the opened session. But where's the problem? could it be that there are metters with sulog?

 

[KenCunningham]

Possibly. What are the permissions on sulog? They should be 600, owned by root:root.

 

[xenia123]

no i can't see anithing in the .profile file which might be causing the hanging.. ive tried it with local and ldap users, but everytime the same problem

 

[Annihilannic]

Is syslogd running? Try restarting it perhaps?

[tt]/etc/init.d/syslog stop
/etc/init.d/syslog start[/tt]

Even so, I don't think that would cause su to hang.

Also make sure that /var isn't full... probably obvious, but...!

As root, try truss -f su - someuser and see if it gives you a clue about where exactly it is hanging.

Annihilannic.

 

[xenia123]

the permissions are set to 600 and owner group are root.

im going to kill the opened sessions over the terminal and then make as root a truss. /var is not full, the capacity is 26%.

another problem is, that the messages file is empty, there's nothing in it..

 

[Annihilannic]

If you type logger -p daemon.notice "This is a test" does it appear in /var/adm/messages?

The messages file being empty is not necessarily a bad thing... if there's nothing wrong on your system and nothing much going on that is quite normal, but rare.

Annihilannic.

 

[xenia123]

hello Annihilannic

Thank you for your help I found the problem. Before some months an other system administrator run jass. And this had modified the /etc/syslog.conf File. Maybe the hanging with su could also in cause of jass..
Now, everything works fine and I hope it will
There are a lot of error messages in the messages file :S but it still works

thanks and regards
xenia123