SDE Compress problems with services file

[Paulvan_der_Est]

I am having a real headscratcher of a problem using the sdeversion command line utility on HP-UX and it seems related to the services file.

I can start and stop the SDE service using sdemon-o start and -o shutdown and it will find the appropriate instance information from the $SDEHOME/etc/services.sde file.

Running sdeversion -o compress -u sde gives me this error:
Error: Entry for SDE instance not found in services file (-102).
Error: Cannot get configuration information

Running sdeversion -o compress -i 5153 -u sde (this particular service is running on 5153), I go through the SDE password prompt and compress confirmation and then get this error:
Error: Insufficient permissions (-25).
Error: Unable to compress state tree.

The truly strange part is that I can do the same thing on another system pointing to another database that is supposed to be configured almost identically and it works.  The differences in configuration are the path to $SDEHOME, the database name and the SDE service running on 5151 instead of 5153. 

I have compared the $SDEHOME/etc/services.sde file on the two systems and they are idendtical in layout and have identical file permissions.  Aside from the user names, home directory and SDE-related paths, the environment variables on the two systems are set the same.  The .profile files for the sde admin user account on the two machines are identical (aside from path environment variables).  The SDE user has identical permissions on both databases.

[VinceAngelo]

Client applications use the getservbyname() function to map service name to port number.
Depending on how your server is configured, this may include a lookup in /etc/services, but
certainly not in $SDEHOME/etc/services.sde.

The "insufficient permissions" error is unrelated to your port issue.  If you enable tracing
by setting SDETRACELOC and SDETRACEMODE variables, you might get more information
about what is happening.  http://edndoc.esri.com/arcsde/9.1/capi_concepts/trace_functions.htm

- V

[Paulvan_der_Est]

Thanks for the help, it got me pointed in the right direction.

It looks like the "cannot get configuration information" problem was because /etc/services did not have an entry for esri_sde.  The sde instance goes by a different name as the server hosts multiple sde instances for different databases.  I modified my so that it plucks the port number out of the $SDEHOME/etc/services.sde file before calling sdeversion and everything runs well.

As far as the permissions issue goes, I am in the process of sorting that out with the DBA, as it looks like they've removed some permissions that SDE needs to run the compress.