su comand is hanging and not returning the shell.

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

  • su - userid keeps hanging without returning the prompt or changing the privileges.
  • All the users were affected by this.

Resolution

  • Corrected the availability of the home directory for the users.

Root Cause

  • The strace revealed that the mount point for the home directory of the user was not available and the system was waiting on this.

Diagnostic Steps

  • Collect strace so that can see at what calls it is hanging on
#strace -fxvttT -s 2048 -o /tmp/strace.txt <command>

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