Infrastructure Software

Hi All,

I have this really strange problem on a Solaris 8 server. I've tried searching on Google but didn't come across anything useful. Hopefully someone here has more experience and can share some of their knowledge.

The basic problem is the user is unable to log into the Solaris 8 server after a period (Anything from a few hours to 10 hours). The Server does not run any Xservers.

The symptoms are as follows:
1. Server responds to pings from other machines
2. rlogin to the server produces the following errors:
No utmpx entry, you must exec "login" from lowest level "shell" or Protocol error
3. rsh will sometimes work but not always (I use rsh to reboot the server when it works)
4. login at the terminal at the physical server produces the following errors:
tmchild: exec service failed, errno=5
INIT: failed write of utmpx entry: "Co"
5. the following errors are printed on the terminal prior to this happening:
cannot open /var/spool/mqueue: Not a directory

I have check disk space on the server and all mounts are at most 40% full.

For the utmpx error the most command suggested fix seems to be to delete the /var/adm/utmpx file and create a new one. This only seems to prolong the period to failing.