Stuck at login

[Jerry Peek]

In article <1991Feb18.112320.25917 at nijmeg> clercqm at nijmeg (Marien de Clercq) writes:
> The problem is that when I login in as one particular user, after giving in
> the password the machine 'hangs'. It does not react anymore to the keyboard 
> and the only way to get out of this is to kill the window (or the session on 
> the terminal server).

Here are a couple of ways I've traced login problems before.
These both assume that your shell gets started and reads the .profile.

Putting this line at the top of the .profile will tell you whether
the .profile is being read at all and where it hangs:
	set -xv
you'll see each line read from the .profile and the commands executed
on the screen.  If you don't see anything, then the shell probably didn't
read the .profile.

The reason might also be that you just aren't getting any output to
the terminal, for some very weird reason.  Then the "set -xv" wouldn't
help you.  In that case, try adding this line to the start of the .profile:
	exec > /tmp/sh.out.$$ 2>&1
If the shell starts reading the .profile, that'll make a file in /tmp
called sh.out.nnnnn with output from the commands and the shell's "set -xv".

--Jerry Peek, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.    jerry at ora.com