Odd man problem

Tom Dunne

Here's one that has me a bit baffled.

We have approx 80 users on a Red Hat system, kernel 2.6.18, 64-bit (not sure of the actual Red Hat version).

Here's a summary of the issue:

• regular user logs in via putty
• regular user issues man command (e.g. man ls)
• regular user gets blank screen with END at the end (suggesting man works, but content is missing)
• root user issues identical man command (e.g. man ls) - works fine
• regular user issues identical man command (e.g. man ls) - suddenly works fine

It is the same for regular users in different groups, so it does not appear to be a group issue. The .bashrc is identical across users, irrespective of groups, so I don't think it is a PATH issue. I can't seem to nail down when this issue actually started, though I know for a fact that the system has not been updated in eons, so it is extremely unlikely an update broke this.

Any ideas where I even begin to troubleshoot this one?

micko45

Old Bug but maybe it will help you trouble shoot it,

bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=127492

Khannie

This is very little help, but it smells like a permissions issue. Does the root doing the man create a file somewhere that regular users can then see? (but that they don't have the permission to create)

You could check by doing an updatedb and output it to a file, then run a man, do another updatedb and output to a second file. Use locate and diff to see the difference.

Knasher

You could also use strace to see what files it is trying to open.
strace -e trace=open man ls

At a guess, man pages are stored inside gziped archives. Perhaps it is extracting that archive to a file in your tmp folder (does the ability to read persist after reboot?) and subsequent reads are reading from that extracted page rather than the gzipped original. So it is possible that you don't have permissions either on where you are extracting to, or read permissions where you are extracting from.

However in the version I'm running it just extracts that archive to a pipe, so perhaps this is completely off base. I just really agree with Khannie, it sounds like a permission problem.

Tom Dunne

Yeah, I'll go with the permissions angle.

That bug from a few years back posted by micko45 appears to tie in with what the rest of you are saying.

I'll get onto it later this week. Thanks for the suggestions.