4.0.3 login hang solved

[roger davis]

Many thanks to all who responded with suggestions for our site's 4.0.3
hanging login problem, which has now been fixed. A number of people were
quite generous in their responses, supplying us with complete YP
auto.master entries, sample automount setups, etc.

The problem was indeed the automounter, and resulted from an attempt to
automount /usr/share. This is a known problem, but there is unfortunately
no information about it whatsoever in any of the 4.0.3 documentation.  The
new 4.1 docs do include such a warning.

The most authoritative response came from Brent Callaghan
(brent at Eng.Sun.COM), who wrote

> The /usr/share entry is your problem.  It deadlocks the automounter.
> This was a problem we discovered in 4.0.3.  There's a warning in
> the 4.1 System and Network Admin Guide (page 439) but alas the
> warning never made it into the man page automount(8) CAVEAT section.
> You must mount /usr/share with an /etc/fstab entry.
>
> The deadlock arises because the automounter sometimes calls
> gettimeofday() and it uses the timezone files in /usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/.
>
> We'll make sure that the warning appears in the next edition of the man
> page.

Thanks again for everyone's help.