Symptoms

During a Linux File System backup of a newly added client the backup appeared to hang. The initial logs showed the following messages;avtar FATAL <5889>: Fatal signal 11 in pid 6579[avtar] FATAL ERROR: <0001> uapp::handlefatal: Fatal signal 11[avtar] ERROR: <0001> uapp::handlefatal: aborting program pid=6579, sig=11avtar FATAL <5890>: handlefatal: Aborting program with code 176, pid=6579, sig=11Environment Info:Avamar Server version 7.2.0-401Avamar Client version 7.2.100-401Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 32bit(Linux 2.6.18-8.1.8.el5 #1 SMP Tue Jul 10 06:50:22 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux)

Cause

After enabling avtar debugging and running btfix against the avtar log, the following messages were seen;[avtar] uapp::handlefatal: begin stack dump bp=0xbfe9a858[avtar] | unixid::getuser(unsigned int) at unixid.cpp:72 <fileref.h:213>[avtar] | userid::extern_lookup(int) at userid.cpp:132 <fileref.h:213>avtar FATAL <5889>: Fatal signal 11 in pid 7884[avtar] FATAL ERROR: <0001> uapp::handlefatal: Fatal signal 11The third line refers to an external user id lookup being performed right before the error occurs.The customer verified that this RHEL server was not using LDAP or NIS for user authentication. 

Resolution

The problem was resolved by adding the following parameter in /usr/local/avamar/var/avtar.cmd --nouserinfo.cat /usr/local/avamar/var/avtar.cmd--nouserinfo

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