ITEM: T7136L

Takes a long time to login

Env: 570 AIX 3.2.4

Question:

The customer had a system crash and had to restore from a
mksysb that was over one year old. When the mksysb was
put on, there were only 24 users on the system. The customer
wrote a shell script to add approximately 900 more users
and append a "default" password in the /etc/security/passwd
file.

After completing the re-installation, the customer noticed
that it took a very long time for the password prompt to
appear after the user had entered his userid. After the
user logged in, things appeared to be normal. But attempting
to use the su command or the login command resulted in delays
of 40 second to a couple of minutes.

Response:

Confirmed that the customer wasn't running NIS. The customer also 
noticed that there is a significant increase in the time required 
to update a password since the mksysb reinstallation. Whereas it 
used to be almost instantaneous, it now takes several dozen seconds.

Also, the customer noticed that some of the users added by the
script are able to login once using their "default" password, but are
unable to login a second time using the either the new password or the
"default" they used on the initial sign-on.

Logged into the system and noticed that /etc/security/passwd and
/etc/security/opasswd were over 20MB in size. They were too big to
edit. Ran cat on /etc/security/passwd and noticed replication of the
stanza for one user five or six times.  This was probably
the result of a programmer doing some testing and not cleaning 
up after himself. I also noticed some garbage data well down into
the file. 

The customer cleaned up the /etc/security/passwd file and that fixed
the problem. His current /etc/security/passwd file -- with some 900
users -- is around 70KB instead of 20MB.



Support Line: Takes a long time to login ITEM: T7136L

Dated: April 1995 Category: N/A

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