Process Table Corrupt?

[George Robbins]

In article <3752 at vela.acs.oakland.edu> schemers at vela.acs.oakland.edu (Roland Schemers III) writes:
> Hello! We have a VAX 6000/310 running Ultrix 4.0 (rev 179), and
> twice since we have installed it in Augest the process table has
> become corrupt! A bunch of system processes were all of a sudden
> owned by a student (different student in both cases)! Here is


It's probably not process table corruption, but rather corruption
of the utmp file.  This used to happen a lot, but it much better
now.

Note that this doesn't alter the privileges of the affected processes,
but there are/were some security holes opened by having inconsistant
utmp info..

> the abbreviated output of ps:
> 
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM   SZ  RSS TT STAT  TIME COMMAND
> schemers 27280 20.6  0.8  498  350 p3 R     0:00 ps -guax
> jfhumphr 27066 12.8  0.1  107   52 14 R     0:09 /etc/syslog
> jfhumphr 27286  1.5  0.1   31   16 14 S     0:00 sh /bin/machine
> jfhumphr 26940  1.2  0.6  301  251 14 I     0:03 init
-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)