Telnet problem solved...Thanks!

[David Pipes]

I reported a telnet problem which occured intermittantly.  Symptoms: no
echo on login or during session, <ctrl>j needed as <return>.  Several
people responded; thanks to all.

Dick St. Peters (did I get that right?) suggested that this was a well
known problem, in which a job left running holds on to it's parents' pty
after logout.  This renders the pty useless as above.  Since we have
recently experienced an increase in users and server/daemon processes, we
had not seen this before (I suspect it went unreported for a while.) I
tested this out by killing off processes attached to ptys (but not ttys!)
after the problem showed.  This freed up the pty.  Also, a person logged
in under the weird conditions above showed the same pty as an already
existing process!  So I believe that this is the problem.  I am going to
call Sun for the patch.

Guy at auspex.com sent along a useful program to cure pty's of "half-remote"
mode.  I tested this, but it did not fix the problem.  Still, it
eliminated what had been the prime suspect in my mind.  Thanks, Guy!

Mike at wuee1.wustl.edu: Couldn't reach you via mail...if you want further
details, write and include a numerical path.  Look for ptys which are
running something but have no current login attached (or are different
from the current login owner).  Hope this helps.  Thanks Again!

| EMail: pipes at nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov             David Pipes |
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