[ILUG] Kernel Problem on Sparc

[Dave Burke]

Evenin'

Just before christmas one of my sparc servers developed a slight problem
(sshd died on it) and we couldn't log in all christmas. When we got back
to college, we couldn't even log in on the console either. Unfortunately
the floppy is v. dodgy on this box, so a reinstall was called for :/

We reinstalled RH5.2 onto the box and it's still sick. Everything is
working on the box but anytime you do anything, the following gets logged
to messages:

Mar  9 18:34:42 naboo kernel: Unimplemented SPARC system call 102
Mar  9 18:34:42 naboo kernel: PSR: 41800081 PC: 500f1968 NPC: 500f196c Y: 
01000000
Mar  9 18:34:42 naboo kernel: g0: 00000000 g1: 00000066 g2: 00000000 g3:
00000000
Mar  9 18:34:42 naboo kernel: g4: 00000000 g5: 00000000 g6: 00000000 g7:
00000070


I'm also having problems changing passwords for users on this box. When I
do a passwd, I get....
[root at naboo /root]# passwd dburke
New UNIX password: 
Retype new UNIX password: 
passwd: Critical error - immediate abort

I did a strace on the process and it threw up the following in the
trace......

chown("/etc/shadow-", 0, 0)     = -1 ENOSYS (Function not implemented)
.
.
connect(8, {sun_family=AF_UNIX, sun_path="/dev/log"}, 16) = -1 EPROTOTYPE
(Protocol wrong type for socket)
.
.
write(2, "passwd: Critical error - immedia"..., 41passwd: Critical error -
immediate abort
) = 41
exit(1)


One thing that I did notice, and I'm not sure what this means, was that on
this box
srw-rw-rw-   1 root     root            0 Feb  2 10:54 /dev/log

But if I do this on one of my intel boxes I get..
srw-rw-rw-   1 root     root            0 Feb 29 14:50 /dev/log=

Probably not related, but what does the added equals mean?
Has anyone any suggested fixes for this problem? I've tried to install a
new kernel on to the box, but I wouldn't even allow an RPM kernel to be
installed. This box ran for about a year on redhat-5.2 and we never had
any problems with it until about 2 weeks before christmas (actually was
our most reliable box until then), so I'm not sure what suddenly made
these problems develop. 

Any ideas/suggestions/advice appreciated!  

Dave


Random Homer Quote......
----------------------------
Listen, you big, stupid space-creature.  Nobody, but nobody, eats the
Simpsons!

       		-- Homer Simpson
		   Treehouse of Horror