[lug] Weird su/sudo/login/ssh/mail problem

[rm at fabula.de]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2002 at 08:57:11AM -0700, Bear Giles wrote:
> One of my systems recently developed a weird symptom that is very
> annoying.  I'll be reinstalling the OS soon anyway (moving to Woody),
> but would like to understand what happened here.
> 
> The problem:  shortly after rebooting (typically around 5 minutes)
> any call to su, sudo, login, or ssh "fails."  I use quotes because
> most of the programs will eventually succeed after a delay of several
> hours.  The same thing happens with outbound mail - it will sit in
> the mail queue for hours or longer.  Yet XDM lets me log in.
> 
> This happens regardless of any activity I do.  It's clear that 
> the trigger is something going on in the background, but I've been
> unable to figure out what it is or why it is having this effect.
> 
> Any ideas?

Interesting problem. Did you try 

 'strace -o /tmp/trace.log   sudo username' 

to detect the sequence of events leading to failure? BTW, how is
"failure" showing? Does the program hang or do you get any messages.
One starting place would be to look at your pam configuration files
(assuming your using Debian the relevant file can be found in '/etc/pam.conf'
and '/etc/pam.d/').

 Ralf Mattes
 
> Bear
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