unable to login as oracle user

[m.roth2006 at rcn.com]

>Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2007 11:00:55 -0800
>From: Troy Knabe <knabe at 4j.lane.edu>  
>
>We have 3 Red Hat 4.4 AS Servers running RAC 10G.  Today one of them had 
>load averages of over 160.  But processors were 99% idle.  

That's dreadful!

> None of the RAC boxes were responding during this time.  I 
> was able to login fine (my local user), and sudo su -.  But 
> when I tried to sudo su - oracle, it just hung.  Finally 
> rebooting fixed the issue.  As I have been looking through 
> log files, this is the only thing "weird" I have found. 
>  We only use local authentication on the box.
>
>/var/log/secure:
>
>Feb  2 08:22:14 orarac1 login: PAM unable to 
>dlopen(/lib/security/pam_limits.so)

PAM *is* local - check to see if the file /lib/security/pam_limits.so exists, and what the permissions and ownership are. PAM is the authentication system that comes with all Linux these days.

I'd worry that something happened to your box, either accidentally, or through an attack.

   mark