Solaris 10 Cannot login

Question

Hello World:
Those of you who are from the "old school" will get the salutation! In any case, I am have a problem with my Solaris 10 system. Recently, I ran patchadd for those patches that were downloaded by the Sun patch manager into /var/sadm/spool. After doing this, I rebooted my system and now I am receiving the following error message and cannot login except in single user mode:
ld.so.1: Login: fatal relocation error: File /usr/lib/passwdutil.so.1: symbol_nsl_fgetspent_r: Referenced symbol not found.
Also, when I login with single user mode and run the passwd command, I get the same error message.
I would greatly appreciate any help as I am under a deadline to get this system back up.
Respectfully,
Mark K.

Answer 1

Hi
I've run into this problem too - and found it pretty frustrating. But I think I have figured out the circumstances in which it happened (at least for me) and a workaround other than reinstalling S10 11/06.
I got the problem when applying a recent S10 SPARC patchcluster and found that login no longer worked and was crashing out with the error
ld.so.1: fatal: relocation error: file /usr/lib/passwdutil.so.1: symbol __nsl_fgetspent_r: referenced symbol not found
I thought I had applied the patchcluster properly, rebooting when required and
continuing the patchcluster until it was all applied. The patchcluster I used was the one dated Sep/19/07. As others have reported you can boot Ok to single user but going multiuser or running login as single user gets the problem.
So I took a look at the shared lib login was complaining about getting the relocation error for.
ldd /usr/lib/passwdutil.so.1 will print out a list of the libs that passwdutil.so.1 uses. I checked through each of these looking for a text definition of the __nsl_fgetspent_r symbol via
for each lib used by passwdutil.so.1
nm lib | grep __nsl_fgetspent_r
done
and as expected could not find a global definition of the symbol.
So I then looked on another system without the Sep/19/07 patchcluster installed and found that __nsl_fgetspent_r is defined in /lib/libnsl.so.1
# nm /lib/libnsl.so.1 | grep __nsl_fgetspent_r
[4968] | 94276| 336|FUNC |GLOB |0 |10 |__nsl_fgetspent_r
But in my check on the problem system, the global def of the symbol was not in /lib/libnsl.so.1. Now our problem system was built initially from a jumpstart which automatically adds a S10 patchcluster (the May/24/07 one).
Looking through the patches in the May/24/07 cluster for those that replaced /lib/libnsl.so.1 I found patch 120473 (rev 08). This patch relaces /lib/libnsl.so.1 and its version of libnsl.so.1 includes the __nsl_fgetspent_r symbol
# nm ./10_Recommended/120473-08/SUNWcslr/reloc/lib/libnsl.so.1 | grep __nsl_fgetspent_r
[4968] | 94276| 336|FUNC |GLOB |0 |10 |__nsl_fgetspent_r
This patch is the 3rd last in the patch order file, so goes on after kernel patch 118833-36. This is important because when I applied the Sep/19/07 patchcluster and ran into the problem, this patchcluster reinstalled 118833-36 but not 120473. (I guess a reinstall of 118833-36 is the default? even if you already have 118833-36).
And 118833-36 includes /lib/libnsl.so.1. This version of libnsl.so.1 does not have a symbol def for __nsl_fgetspent_r. The Sep/19/07 patchcluster does not include patch 120473 so if you apply the patchcluster you end up with a libnsl.so.1 without the needed symbol. Patch 120473 is not included because sometime between May/24/07 and Sep/19/07 patch 120473 was made obsolete, so therefore no longer included into the patchcluster.
My workaround was to reinstall the latest (last) rev of this obsolete patch, 120472-12 to get a version of /lib/libnsl.so.1 with the symbol. This is not the best option because you aren't supposed to install obsolete patches, but the system seems ok so far (it is not a production system).
What looks like a better option rather than reinstalling an obsolete patch is to install the patch that is documented as superceding it; this is the latest kernel patch, 120011-14, which includes /lib/libnsl.so.1 with the __nsl_fgetspent_r symbol. However this patch is currently broken because it itself requires an obsolete patch, so cannot be installed. Sun should hopefully fix this soon.