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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!newsxfer.itd.umich.edu!gumby!yale!yale!pipedream.mgh.harvard.edu!pipes From: pipes@pipedream.mgh.harvard.edu (Robert A. Wheeler) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: 'su' hangs after entering password Date: 4 Oct 1994 01:30:08 GMT Organization: MGH, Boston Lines: 33 Sender: pipes@pipedream.mgh.harvard.edu Message-ID: <36qb70$b84@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> References: <36p9am$86q@babyblue.cs.yale.edu> <36pvhd$52c@news.simplex.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: pipedream.mgh.harvard.edu In article <36pvhd$52c@news.simplex.nl>, Rob Simons <rob@Simplex.NL> wrote: >Robert A. Wheeler (pipes@pipedream.mgh.harvard.edu) wrote: >: Once in a great while an attempt to get superuser (su) hangs >: after entering the password. The ps entry looks like this: >: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND >: root 8491 0.0 3.6 192 516 p0 I<U+ 10:11AM 0:00.17 su >: Can anyone shed some light on this? Rebooting via the reset button >: generally works, but I don't (obviously) like to do this... >Why rebooting ? Apparently you have root priviliges, and are able to >access the machine still after the 'su' hangs, so why not just kill >the non-functional 'su' in stead of rebooting ? The system is configured without a console, so to obtain root, I must login as myself and 'su' to root. Since the su process has become root, I can't kill the non-functional su. Someone (you, in fact!) suggested ^Z at the hang, which may or may not work. I have to wait until the next occurance... This doesn't seem like the correct solution to gain root, though :) >You should wait some time to see if your get a time-out on some >process, perhaps it's something which gets called when executing >your .cshrc (or whatever) file that hangs ? I've waited as long as an hour. No change, no cpu accumulation. Thanks, though! Any further suggestions? Has anyone else suffered the same or similar problem?