[4764] in Hotline Meeting
reporting dialup problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Krikorian)
Thu Apr 25 17:55:02 1991
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 91 17:53:43 -0400
From: David Krikorian <dkk@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: cfyi@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-dialup@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, hotline@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: dkk@mit.edu
This afternoon, I happened to notice a user trying to become root on a
dialup. My usual course of action in such situations is to tell the
user (by zephyr, when possible) that regular users don't get root
access to the dialup hosts, and ask them if they need any help.
This particular user said that e40-008-7 wasn't able to attach
lockers, and that he'd reported it a few days previously. Since I
know a problem like that would have surely been fixed by now, I
checked on his homedir, and sure enough, that one filesystem couldn't
be attached on #7.
I remember seeing a report about trouble attaching lockers on a
dialup, but whoever reported this problem for the user didn't include
enough information to solve this problem the first time. (He said "I
followed the login message. I called the olc.") It would have been
helpful if the username, or at least the lockername (same thing, in
this case) were included in the report.
The following are the slightly gory details of the user's problem and
how to recognize it:
The attachtab (/etc/attachtab on the dialups) was truncated at some
point, apparently. The /etc/mtab file looks like may have also been
damaged.
An attempt to attach the user's locker gave "Device busy", which is
often a symptom of the problem described above. Running the command:
df /mit/lockername
returns the error "Couldn't find mount point for lockername". At this
point, someone who has both root access and knowledge of how to fix
this problem should be contacted. Please send mail to bug-dialup
with the names of the machine and the locker. (The username might
often be helpful, too.)
Thanks for being OLC!
David Krikorian
Systems Support, part-time
