A funny thing happened on the way to Utah...

[Roy Smith]

daveg at 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 at alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"My karma ran over my dogma"