Inetd strikes back

[Thomas Benedict]

Several times over the past two months, our 4D/80 has mysteriously
disabled logins.  The last time it happened, someone was running
emacs.  Even after the weirdness started, he could still use emacs,
could still save, etc.  But as soon as he quit emacs, he couldn't
restart it.  As soon as he logged out, he couldn't log back in.  Like
the previous times, the reset button was hit.

This morning I caught our machine in the act.  A look at "ps -eaf"
showed 18 copies of /usr/etc/inetd running.  That seemed somewhat
strange to me.  So I tried it again.  19 copies.  It turns out they
were spawning pretty quickly.  By the time I finally rebooted the
machine there were 25 copies.

During this time I tried to run some programs.  It seemed like
everything which used the network at all refused to start.  This made
sense with all of the inetd daemons running, but was really annoying.
For instance, who would work, but finger wouldn't.  So I had a hard
time finding out how long some of the remote logins were idle.  I
tried to talk to one guy to ask what shell he was running, but talk
wouldn't work.  Nor would mail (I was getting kinda ticked by now).
When I figured it was time to cut losses and get this thing back up
and running I found out that rlogin, telnet, and su were busted as
well.  This one was another reset button restart.

Has anyone else had similar problems?  What would cause inetd to spawn
off like that?

Tom Benedict
benedict at chaos.utexas.edu
Center for Nonlinear Dynamics