From: gilles@dgbt.doc.ca (Gilles Gagnon) Subject: Re: Problem logging in Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 19:29:04 GMT
In article <905@esquire.dpw.com>, jenkins@DPW.COM (Colin Jenkins) writes:
|> In article <1lh0lmINNe4e@access.digex.com> sunilg@access.digex.com (Sunil Gupta) writes:
|> >
|> >I recently set up Linux 0.99pl4 and can no longer login as root or as
|> >any of the user accounts. Whenever I try to login in, I get a message
|> >stating:
|> >
|> >utmp not found. Must "login"...
|>
|> Couple of things to check for. First, I'd boot the SLS a1 and a2 floppies,
|> and mount your root filesytem on /mnt. make sure your root filesystem is not
|> full (as this will prevent updates to /etc/utmp). Second, make sure that the
|> /etc directory and /etc/utmp exist. If they do and your root partition is
|> not full, try removing /etc/utmp and the creating an empty one with
|> "touch /etc/utmp".
|>
|> There is a bug where root console logins will be disallowed when the root
|> file system is full. You will get a message indicating that you must login
|> in from a lower level shell (because the utmp file is missing or corrupt due
|> to the full file system).
|>
|> Good luck.
|> Colin
The same thing happened to me the other day. Just after I booted the system
and got the login prompt, I tried to log on and got the same message. I tried
loging on a few seconds later and I succeeded. Not knowing much about the
internals of linux (or any UNIX OS as a matter of fact), I came up with the
following hypothesis:
in /etc/rc I have : "/bin/rm -f /etc/utmp ; touch /etc/utmp"
so I thought that maybe /etc/utmp doesn't physically exist on
disk until 'sync' is issued in which case if someone is to log
on before that file is written to disk he/she will get the "..utmp
not found. Must .." message but will be able to log on some short
time later. But again aren't file buffers supposed to be written
to disk after a process has finished running?
Any one cares to give some explanations or ideas?
Thanks
BTW None of my filesystems where full and I run linux 0.99pl4. on a 386sx16
with 10MB RAM.
--
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