comsat and biff

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

In article <17033 at bellcore.bellcore.com> tr at ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) writes:
>On one of our two Pyramids, users get biff messages for other users.

Yeah, this seems to happen from time to time, in little bursts. I'm not sure
what causes it. The folks at Cal Poly have narrowed it down quite a bit; if I
could find an environment where it occurs consistently I could nail it. We're
running the plain 4.3BSD comsat, with no hacking done to it, so it's probably
some kind of portability problem, e.g., dereferencing a NULL pointer. It is
definitely a problem in scanning /etc/utmp.

>... but I can't check because Pyramid's source code is priced out of this
>world.

I thought we pretty much charged what AT&T does....? I don't know for sure.
Some of it we won't sell at all any more; too much risk at having enhance-
ments like virtual disk suddenly appear in other people's machines.

<csg>