system hangs when I type "who" or "ps" or ...

From: Steven Michael ROBBINS <stever_at_po-box-cgrl-lab.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 10:29:47 -0500

Hello,

I'm running Digital UNIX V4.0F on a DECStation 3000.

The system got into a weird state last week, in which it
still serves NFS and web as normal, but if I log in and type
"who" or "ps" or some other commands, my terminal session
hangs --- neither ^C nor ^Z can get the shell back.

I rebooted a few days back but the problem returned.

Searching through the list archives, I found the summary
to a similar question

  http://www.ornl.gov/its/archives/mailing-lists/tru64-unix-managers/2000/05/msg00497.html

In the responses, someone suggested to trace the system calls
of ps, which I did. It gets stuck on a stat() call:

    ...
    stat ("/dev/ttyp2", 0x11fffee90) =


And so I of course did "ls -l /dev/ttyp2" and promptly hung yet
another terminal session ... I can't run "lsof" to find out
the process using this tty either ...

Does this ring any bells? Maddeningly, I had this problem
years ago, but I can't recall how I fixed it, and I can't
find my notes!

Desperately yours,
-Steve
Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 15:30:09 NZST

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