3004-010 Failed setting terminal ownership & mode

[Brian Kelley]

We recently upgraded our NIS master server from a Sun 3/260 running 4.0.3
to a SparcStation 1+ running 4.1.1.  Things have gone fairly well with the
exception of our RS6000 machines.

Basically, none of the users in our testing group can login to the system.
They get the "3004-010 Failed setting terminal ownership & mode" message
just after /etc/motd is displayed and get immediately bumped back to the
login prompt.  In trying to determine what was going on, I discovered
the following:

If your group entry in the password file is between 251 and 300 (I didn't
check above 300. Our test people are 300), you can't login to the system.

The problem applies to console, rlogin, telnet and rsh sessions.  The
problem exists on 3003 and 3005.  Obviously for one reason or another
the system is unable to set the proper uid/gid on the user's tty.

Logging in with a working uid (<251), I took a look at /dev/console with a
user logged in:

crw--w--wT   1 1936682085 audit      4,  0 Sep 14 1990  console

What is wrong with this picture?  That uid is 1.9 billion!  This "symptom"
occurs under 3003 but not 3005.  If the user is a member of group 300
and there primary group in the passwd file is < 250, they will be able to
login - the problem seems to only occur with the gid as defined in the
password file.  This problem also occurs with local user accounts which are
not defined in NIS.

IBM is working on this problem but it may be some time before they can
find a solution.  Any thoughts??  I will summarize.


  Brian


---
brian at cimage.com