HELIOS Tech Info #073

HELIOS Services not starting on IRIX 6.5

It can happen that HELIOS services on SGI IRIX 6.5 do not start and the “srvsrv” process does issue the system messages:

srvsrv[]: Authentication failed
srvsrv[]: exiting

The “srvsrv” program uses file descriptor passing via UNIX domain sockets for authentication. On some IRIX versions the passed file descriptor is not valid and authentication fails.

Currently HELIOS has received related reports only for SGI IRIX 6.5.21 and 6.5.22

We recommend to report the failed startup of HELIOS Services to SGI support so that this can be addressed in a future IRIX update.

SGI has released updates for IRIX which address the problem that “srvsrv” process does not start and issue the system messages:

srvsrv[]: Authentication failed
srvsrv[]: exiting

SGI Bug ID is:
#904631-837498 introduces a regression for non-_XOPEN_SOURCE recvmsg()

IRIX patches:
IRIX Patch 5415: Networking Updates for 6.5.21m
IRIX Patch 5416: Networking Updates for 6.5.21f
IRIX Patch 5469: Networking Updates for 6.5.22m/f

IRIX 6.5.23 already contains the changes.