About John Storta, Jr. Expertise I am a Sun Certified Solaris Administrator. I can answer virtually any question relating to the administration of Sun servers. I have experience installing hardware, managing user accounts, maintaining file systems, setting up backup and recovery plans, configuring Veritas NetBackup, and general troubleshooting.
Experience I have been a UNIX System Administrator for 5 years. I have implemented 5 systems as a Project Leader. I have seen a wide range of problems over the years and found solutions for all of them.
Organizations Independant Computer Consultants Association
Education/Credentials Sun Certified Solaris Administrator
Training in Oracle SQL and Veritas NetBackup
30+ university level Computer Science credits
Awards and Honors Received outstanding service award for my achievements
Recognized by VP and CEO following system implementation
Expert: John Storta, Jr. Date: 3/27/2001 Subject: Solaris error message
Question Hi!
I'm a real newbie in the computer field (have only been in it less than a year). I recently got a good buy (?) on a Sun SPARC5 work station (I believe it's either Solaris 5 or 7 that's loaded on it). After it boots up, I get the following error message "rpc lockd. cannot contact status monitor". This error message cascades diagonally across the screen, and the system is completely locked up. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! Shawn R. Daniel
Answer There appears to be some sort of NFS (Network File System) problem here. lockd is a process used when you have nfs mounted file systems.
It sounds to me like your system is trying to mount some file systems remotely, but it cannot find the server that it is supposed to mount them from.
The simplest solution would be to disable NFS.
To do this you have a few options. here is the method I would recommend.
I don't know how much you are familiar with SUN workstations, so if I mention something that is unclear, let me know.
1) Turn the system on and get to an OK prompt. To do this, press STOP-A when the Solaris banner appears. You should see an OK prompt.
2) Type boot -s and hit ENTER
3) The system should boot to sungle user mode. If the problem is with NFS, this should work fine, since NFS stuff isn't loaded in single user mode.
4) Login with the root sign-on
5) cd into the /etc/rc3.d directory
6) Look for a file that starts with a capital S and has a name such as nfs.server or something.
7) Rename the file using a lowercase s
8) cd to the /etc directory
9) edit the vfstab file
10) Look for any entries that have a file system type of nfs.
11) Either remove them or comment them out.
12) reboot your computer and let it come up to run level 3, which should be the default.
Hopefully, that will prevent the error from occuring and allow you to get the system booted.
Basically we did two things.
First, we told the system to not try and start the NFS processes
and then we got rid of the commands that were trying to use the NFS processes.
Let me know if this works or if you need more information.
John Storta, Jr.
Sun Certified Solaris Administrator
Perspective Systems
www.perspectivesystems.50megs.com
