Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!roy From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: A funny thing happened on the way to Utah... Message-ID: <1990Feb27.211138.17545@phri.nyu.edu> Date: 27 Feb 90 21:11:38 GMT References: Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System) Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Lines: 37 daveg@near.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes: > At eight minutes to midnight I get another talk request, and respond as > usual [...] My friend in Utah has logged off now, but I presume he tried > to talk to me and somehow his network software used this other guy's > address instead of its own address. We've seen similar sorts of things on our machines. There are various flavors, all of them involving in one way or another failure to properly release a pty. We once had (I think on our Vax, when we were running 4.2BSD) a situation where you would rlogin to the machine and get connected to somebody's old login session. I've seen this on occasion with various systems. There is one NCR Tower around here to which I can remember once telnetting to and being surprised to see, instead of the usual login prompt, just "# "! A more common thing on our SunOS-3.5.2 suns is related to talk and suntools not properly cleaning up after itself when you close a shelltool window abruptly. Lets say I quit suntools without C-D'ing all my shelltools. If you run w, it will appear that I'm still logged in. Now, if somebody tries to talk to me, they just get an endless stream of "ringing your party again..." messages. They get fed up with this and C-C their talk. When I next log in, I get a "connection requested by ..." message pop up in my console window. Of course, when I respond to the connection request, the person denies trying to talk to me and thinks I initiated the conversation. The same (I think!) suntools pty bug also sometimes causes CCA emacs to go into an endless loop, if you leave an emacs running in a shelltool window and just quit suntools. We've never tracked it down exactly, but I'm sure the emacs is just looping doing a read(), and not recognizing that it read 0 characters as EOF. Possibly it's doing this in the middle of a non dismissable "do you want to save this file before exiting?" type of thing. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"