Wouldn't that have been nice!

No, it wasn't ^S on the console.  That would have kept me off the console,
but would not have explained the hung su procs.

I did a hard (press the reset button - *ouch* ) reboot on the box this
morning, and it came right back up, and seems fine.  /var/log/messages
is getting stuff added as expected, so whatever was stuck before is
no longer stuck.

For lack of a better guess, I'm guessing that it's a bad spot on my
main disk, although it seems odd that it would *hang* rather than generate
an error, and normally when SCSI disks hang like that they are more obnoxious
about not giving up during re-try. (I could ctrl-C out of the hung su)

Any guesses from the list about what might have been wrong?

Any clever ideas on how to get a console when su won't work, and
the console is not responding? (at all).

I've done a crude disk scan (dd if=/dev/sd0c of=/dev/null) and it read the
whole disk without complaint.

?????

I'd send_pr it, but I don't have much useful information to provide.
I don't *really* even have a good description of what was wrong.

-dgl-

At 1:33 AM -0500 4/19/02, Tod McQuillin wrote:
>On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Donald Lee wrote:
>
>> At 11:30 AM yesterday morning, the syslog (/var/log/messages) stopped
>> adding data to the file.  I find that I cannot "su" on the machine to
>> even see some of the other logs, like authlog or xferlog.
>>
>> When I do an "su", it hangs after I enter the password.  It apparently
>> accepts the password, because if I give it an incorrect one, it says
>> "Sorry".
>>
>> The console does not work (no response on serial port - serial console)
>
>Sounds like someone pressed ^S on the console.
>
>You should be able to clear everything up again by typing ^Q on the
>console.
>-- 
>Tod McQuillin