Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!columbia!garfield!yoram
From: yoram@garfield (Yoram Eisenstadter)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Sun Shutdown(8)
Message-ID: <6224@columbia.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 89 01:49:50 GMT
References: <21613@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@columbia.edu
Reply-To: yoram@cs.columbia.edu
Organization: Columbia University CS Department
Lines: 37

In article <21613@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> gast@CS.UCLA.EDU () writes:
>What is with this program?  It sends out too many messages.  It is
>impossible to get any work done in the 5 or 10 minutes before a
>machine goes down...
>...
>Our sys admins say they can do nothing about this problem because
>of the way Sun wrote the program.  Is this really true?  Isn't
>there some undocumented option they can specify that will be less
>verbose?
>
>David Gast
>gast@cs.ucla.edu
>{uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!{ucla-cs,cs.ucla.edu}!gast

      I also used to be plagued by numerous messages about hosts all
      over our network being shut down.  These messages actually come
      to you courtesy of an RPC program called "rwall" (remote "wall"),
      which "shutdown" calls to send messages to remote hosts which it
      thinks might be interested.

      One easy way to avoid getting any such messages is to disable the
      rwall daemon that runs on your workstation (rwalld).  You can do
      this by commenting out its entry in your /etc/inetd.conf file and
      then reinitializing inetd by sending it a SIGHUP signal.

      A less extreme approach might be to have your rwall daemon run as
      something other than root (the userid for running an inetd service
      is specified in inetd.conf), so that you can selectively disable
      its messages with "mesg n" (I haven't tried this approach, so I'm
      not 100% sure that it works).

      Cheers..Y
--
Yoram Eisenstadter                     | Internet: yoram@cs.columbia.edu
Columbia U., Dept. of Computer Science | UUCP:     rutgers!columbia!cs!yoram
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