Why's SMC failing on startup?

Posted by Brian Knoblauch on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Brian Knoblauch
Published on 2010-03-05T14:00:25Z Indexed on 2010/03/08 12:51 UTC
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Filed under:

passwd

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smc

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solaris

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vipw

Trying to remove a user from one of our servers, but I seem to be thwarted at every turn...

SMC refuses to load the user list (failing with a NoClassDefFoundError in the listAll method of UserContent).

vipw just returns with "vipw: /etc/passwd file busy".

I'm the only user on the system at the moment (it's our backup SRSS box), and both of these fail even right after a reboot. I don't have console access at the moment either unfortunately (or I would try single user mode). Of course, even if init mode S worked and let me do this one task, it doesn't solve the root problem.

Ideas?

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