User Not Informed of Reaching Limits

During normal operation of Solaris Resource Manager, a logged-in user receives notification messages whenever a limit is reached. Sometimes users miss seeing these communications and are unaware of the cause of any problems they are having, and the system will appear to behave mysteriously. However, the system administrator will have been notified.

The delivery of notification messages is carried out by the Solaris Resource Manager daemon program, limdaemon. There are a number of possibilities that the administrator can investigate if notification messages are not being delivered to users:

• The console window is hidden. If a user has logged in using a particular window and then opened additional windows that cover the login window, the user may miss a message delivered to the login window.

• The limdaemon program is not running.

• limdaemon is unable to dynamically allocate additional memory to maintain its internal structures. If this happens, limdaemon displays a diagnostic message on the system console the first time that it fails to get sufficient memory. It continues to attempt to get memory, but fails silently after the first attempt.

• The utmp file is corrupt or missing. limdaemon relies on this file to identify the terminals where a user is logged in, so notification messages can be sent to those terminals. If the utmp file is corrupted or missing, an error message is reported on the console, and the notification message delivery is suppressed.

• limdaemon is unable to deliver a message due to a system limitation. For example, if limdaemon needs to open a window on a terminal to deliver the message and is unable to, then the message is dropped.