[ Next Article | Previous Article | Book Contents | Library Home | Legal | Search ]
Network Information Services (NIS and NIS+) Guide

Troubleshooting NIS+ Namespace Database Problems

This section covers problems related to the namespace database and tables.

Symptoms

Error messages with operative clauses such as:

"Abort_transaction: Internal database error"

"Abort_transaction: Internal Error, log entry corrupt"

"Callback: - select failed"

"CALLBACK_SVC: bad argument"

See also Ownership and Permission Problems.

Multiple rpc.nisd Parent Processes

Symptoms

Various Database and transaction log corruption error messages containing the terms:

"Corrupt log"

"Log corrupted"

"Log entry corrupt"

"Corrupt database"

"Database corrupted"

Possible Causes

You have multiple independent rpc.nisd daemons running. In normal operation, rpc.nisd may spawn other child rpc.nisd daemons. This causes no problem. However, if two parent rpc.nisd daemons are running at the same time on the same machine, they will overwrite each other's data and corrupt logs and databases. (Normally, this could only occur if someone started running rpc.nisd by hand.)

Diagnosis

Run ps -ef | grep rpc.nisd. Make sure that you have no more than one parent rpc.nisd process.

Solution

If you have more than one parent rpc.nisd entries, you must kill all but one of them. Use kill -9 process-id, then run the ps command again to make sure it has died. (If you started rpc.nisd with the -B option, you must also kill the rpc.nisd_resolv daemon.)

If an NIS+ database is corrupt, you will also have to restore it from your most recent backup that contains an uncorrupted version of the database. You can then use the logs to update changes made to your namespace since the backup was recorded. However, if your logs are also corrupted, you will have to recreate by hand any namespace modifications made since the backup was taken.


[ Next Article | Previous Article | Book Contents | Library Home | Legal | Search ]