Client Not Booting from NIM -- nobody user issue

While attempting to boot a NIM client from a NIM master. The new master had been configured on an existing LPAR, with a running application and had been hardened from an OS security point of view. The following message was displayed on the console while attempting to tftp the

client info file:

TFTP::FAILED TO READ FIRST DATA BLOCK..RETRYING TRANSFER.. 1

Starting tftpd produced the following message in syslog:

Aug 14 12:44:12 bxaix85 daemon:info tftpd[1019942]: [00000001] EZZ7062I Error: cannot determine the user.

The NIM boot failed after bootpd, when the connection to tftpd was attempted. It timed out.

The lssrc command showed tftpd was running. However, there was a <defunct> child process.

# lssrc -a | grep tft

tftpd tcpip 725102 active

# ps -ef | grep tftp

root 622694 725102 0 16:12:33 - 0:00 <defunct>

root 725102 188634 0 16:12:33 - 0:00 /usr/sbin/tftpd -v -s

The user "nobody" had been removed from the system as part of the AIX security hardening policy. To fix the problem I had to add user nobody on the NIM master and restart tftpd.

# stopsrc -s tftpd

# mkuser id=4294967294 pgrp=nobody groups=nobody home=/ nobody

# startsrc -s tftpd

The following message appeared in syslog:

Aug 18 14:38:07 bxaix85 daemon:info tftpd[622696]: [00000001] EZZ7001I Starting.

The tftpd processes appeared to be running as expected now.

# lssrc -a | grep tft

tftpd tcpip 725102 active

# ps -ef | grep tftp

nobody 622694 725102 0 16:12:33 - 0:00 /usr/sbin/tftpd -v -s

root 725102 188634 0 16:12:33 - 0:00 /usr/sbin/tftpd -v -s

The NIM client was then able to boot and the install completed successfully.