On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Brian C. Grayson wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 19, 1999 at 12:00:38PM -0500, mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > I have a couple of NetBSD-1.4.1 machines on a network here.  The network
> > uses NIS with a solaris NIS master.  Both NIS and AMD seem to work most of
> > the time, but yesterday, when some of the solaris machines (an NIS master
> > and also NFS server) went down and got rebooted, both NetBSD machines
> > became somewhat hung.  I can log in, sort of.  I get the "NetBSD 1.4.1
> > ..." kernel version message, and the "Welcome to NetBSD!", but no prompt.
> > This is when I log in as root, so it shouldn't be looking for a remote
> > home directory.
> > 
> > Then I just get messages like:
> > 
> > nfs server pid197@ballast:/u: not responding
> > nfs server pid197@ballast:/u: is alive again
> > nfs server pid197@ballast:/u: not responding
> 
>   Do you have your mail on /u, by any chance?  Depending on your
> shell, some of them like to check your mailbox for incoming
> mail for you, which can cause the shell to hang, if the mail
> mount is flaky, IIRC.  From a quick ktrace experiment, it looks
> like bash does a stat on /var/mail/root, but csh, sh, and tcsh
> don't.  Of course, if your setup sets the tcsh/csh "mail"
> variable, then csh/tcsh _will_ check.

aah.  I do have mail on /u.  /var/mail is a symlink to /u/mail which is
automounted.  Well, this may explain why I can't then login even as root.
Root's shell is the default csh, but it looks like login(1) checks for
mail.  

I set up the mail this way just because thats how all the solaris machines
in the department are done so I just made the 2 NetBSD boxes the same.
Maybe I need to find a better way so when things get hung I can at least
log in as root.

>   Also, does anything in your /root/.profile or /root/.cshrc
> reference any non-local filesystems (like a shared /usr/local,
> or /u/myfavoriteuser/bin)?
nope.

-Dan