I have recently been assigned to help maintain some testing software on two UNIX stations. The stations are connected to instruments that supply power, signals, and take measurements from a box. Both test stations are basically the same. I was given a crash course (read a little training) a couple of weeks ago, introducing me to the proprietary software environment that test the boxes, and a little UNIX information. The UNIX stations, called homer and lisa, are stand-alone machines, that are networked together. I can type “rusers” and see both computers, and think I have been able to ftp files from one to another. The crash course came as there was a problem with the testing software. The training was supplied by another software engineer who had written and maintained the testing software until about 5 years ago, and has moved onto other projects. During the time he was training me, he was fixing the big problems, and giving me some little things to do. He was working on lisa. I was working on homer. We made copies of the testing software to make the changes. This is the main difference between stations: what copies have been made. I asked my trainer what he did before he left, and this is what he told me:
The last thing I attempted on lisa was to make a backup of the system using the tape drive. I tried a command in the "tar" utility that tells it to stop after so many blocks and it is suppose instruct you to insert another tape into the drive. When I came back the next day, the "tar" had aborted and displayed an error message. I would have thought that rebooting the tester would clear any problems that the "tar" had created. If nothing else seems to work, I would look up the "tar" commands and see if there is any command that "resets" the tar utility.
The next time we logged on and then off lisa, we started getting a message
I was given the suggestion of trying “df –k” which gave these results: (ignore the exact numbers. I took a screen shot with my phone camera, and am just trying to read the blurry results. The capacity % is correct. Other numbers are not exact, except for 0. I can tell that one.)
I also did the “df –k” on homer, and it came up very similar. There was a difference of a few bytes, and maybe changed the capacity of the s6 and s7 a percentage point or so, but nothing major. So I am confused as to what the “file system full message” is telling me. Why isn’t it on both? What am I missing?
Being corrupted by Windows, I thought, maybe if I reboot the computer, it might reset the problem. I asked the technician who does the tests how to reboot, or restart UNIX, as I didn’t know. He didn’t either. We powered down the main tester, which is done in the main part of environment, logged out of UNIX. Then I pushed the power button. I guess there is a shutdown command I should have used, correct? I turned it back on, and saw some more messages during the boot-up process.
And
Then I tried to login, and received this message:
From a little research, I see that there are different files for containing login and logout information. That is the utmp, utmpx, wtmp, and wtmpx, and a few others. According to my research, I can and should clear out the contents of these when they get to big. I was finally given a way to login, and these are the steps I went through, and what I did after I logged in.
Stop-a
Typed “boot –s”
Logged in as single user root, with the root password
Typed “df –k”
Typed “fsck –y /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0, which fixed a problem.
<cntl> d
And tried to login again, and still received the “no utmpx entry” message. So I went through the above process again, until the <cntl> d. I stayed logged in and tried to look at the utmp, utmpx, wtmp, and wtmpx files. In the research, I saw that there are several directories to look:
I don’t understand why there are at least three places to find these files? I did a “ls –l” in each of those directories, and everything looked the same. I wonder if they are the same directory, just being pointed to, not actually different places? Any comments? Maybe I will try to see this in a little while. Anyway, umpt was around 72, utmpx was about 10x that, at around 740, wmpt was around 7100 and wmptx was 74000. I can’t remember exact sizes, I do remember that they were about this magnitude different from each other. I think that I compared this to homer, and saw very similar numbers. So I am still confused as to why lisa gives me “file system full” messages and homer doesn’t.
So if you got through reading this, I will say, “URGENT!!” and “help me!!!!!” but of course, that is why I am here.
I will summarize my questions, in case you didn’t see them.
Why do I get an message saying the file system is full on one, when according to “df –k” the file system sizes are about the same?
Why is there at least three places to find the utmp, utmpx, wtmp, and wtmpx? Are they all different? Or is it all pointing to the same place?
Is the best way to get over the message to clear the contents of all of the above files, and start new?
Is there a better way to find out the sizes of the filesystem? I see in the /dev/dsk/ directory that there are several c0t0d0s0 type files. Are these all the partitions? I can’t access them, and the df –k only shows the s0, s6 and s7, but there are others. Are those from a different setup? I really don’t understand the UNIX filesystem. Is there a good way to understand them?
I think this is all my questions for now. I appreciate any help you can give me, as I am just sitting around banging my head against a wall trying to figure this out.
Thanks,
Brian
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Last edited by zaxxon; 10-19-2011 at 02:26 PM..
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