hi everybody, this is my first visit here.

i have a sco unixware 7.1 box. terminals are connected thru digi multiserial devices. some users are also connected over the lan from pc stations running terminal emulation programs.

in few last weeks periodically ( almost every other day ) happens the situation where:
- the users already connected are getting 'frozen'
- the users trying to login are able to type their username and password, they see the welcome text but no shell prompt is shown and no echo is displayed when they type some chars. On the other side the system seems to be running, because if they try to type 'exit' the session ends. this happens if 'normal users' are trying to login. root user can nicely login and normally work, except that when he types :
# shutdown -y -i0 -g0
.. to stop the system, he gets
UX:sh (/sbin/shutdown): ERROR: Cannot make pipe

.. so, i use ' init 0 ' to stop it and reboot
after rebooting the system works fine for couple days and so on .....


i have read the log files ( syslog, osmlog ) , no useful info there
i also have visited sco.com, but i have not found similar problems in their knowledge base.

thanks for attention

it seems your box is just running into resource issues that are being depleted as users work on it ... the last time i saw something like this was on a development box with people testing apps that cannot seem to release memory when not needed anymore ... only reboots can fix the problem ... the problem persisted until i told the development managers that their programs kept killing the box even after all the tuning we could do on it ...

either get an additional box or tune the system ...


good luck!

i applied the latest maintenance pack for Unixware 7.1.1 and thus the problem seems to be resolved. the box is running last month without break!!

anyway, thanks for response.