ERROR: "/bin/ksh: Not owner"

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

When ssh'ing into certain Unix boxes I'm seeing two errors that appear immediately after entering the password I've never seen. After the error message is displayed the connection closes immediately. The first is �/bin/ksh: Not owner� after which the connection is closed. And, �Read from remote host he2lnxweb-3: Connection reset by peer�.

Any help with understanding what is going on greatly appreciated

twk

2

Gonna need some more info....

  1. What is the exact action/output sequence you see?
  2. What versions of OS are the systems that fail?
  3. What OS versions of systems that work?
  4. Anything change recently (patches? upgrades? etc...)
3

What is the exact action/output sequence you see?

$ ssh user@host
Enter your LAN Password:
Last login: Fri Sep 18 09:38:27 2009 from host.f
/bin/ksh: Not owner
Connection to host closed.

Responding to the rest of the questions is somewhat problematic since I can not get into and stay in the host!

If it helps what I've done is write a script to test the access of a several hosts and related directories for a particular username. The hosts are in the enterprise network but not hosts in which I normally work.

The curious thing is that if I use my personal credentials to access the host I can but when I do a uanme -a the name of the host that appears in not the one I use to ssh to?

SunOS Z<different host name> 5.10 Generic_141414-02 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise

  1. What versions of OS are the systems that fail?
  2. What OS versions of systems that work?
  3. Anything change recently (patches? upgrades? etc...)

---------- Post updated at 10:55 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:40 AM ----------

I did a nslookup on the host name used with the ssh command and it is an alias to the host name provided by the uname -a. Additonally, and not supprisingly, when I ssh to the canonical name I get the same response.

4

I'm guessing that the default shell for your username on the remote host is /bin/ksh.

I wonder if the protection for /bin/ksh is screwed up, not 755, but maybe 744. That is, maybe you don't have execute privilege for some reason. The system administrator (or someone with root privilege) will have to straighten that one out.

5

Or maybe the home directory is not owned by the login account.

You said you could login using your creds. Login in to one of the offending systems and look at the account stuff for the user id that is failing. I'd look at the home directory, shell entry, rc files for starters.

6

The message "No owner" usually comes from trying to delete/rename/move a file which you do not own in a directory with the "sticky bit" set. I think we need to see the ".profile" file for the remote user with every character visible. Modern ksh doesn't worry about the permissions on ".profile" itself (it either executes or doesn't) so we are probably looking for a ".profile" file which contains a faulty command sequence.
My first inclination is to rename the remote ".profile" for elimination purposes.
After this test we may need to look at the remote /etc/profile .