Tcsh/Ftp problem

[Chris Schanzle]

rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
> Many versions of ftp look up a file /etc/shells.  This file is supposed to
>contain a list of all valid user shells.  Ftp will not permit access if the
>shell is not in this list.  (Actually it is not 'ftp', but the daemon 'ftpd'
>which listens for network connections, which enforces this rule).

[The system is a Sun 386i/250 SunOS 4.0.2.  (please, no flames...it's what
they gave me to struggle with...)]

For quite a while, I've been having random ftp login failures right after
typing the username.  The connection would close *immediately* and "in.ftpd"
would dump core in the root directory.  Ftp would usually work right after
a reboot, but would consistantly dump core after a random period of time.

Most accounts use "tcsh" as their login shell, and /etc/shells pointed
to /usr/local/bin/tcsh, /bin/{sh,csh}, but some would work while
others broke.  Yech.

After updating to tcsh 5.19 and putting the shells in /bin, I copied
tcsh.519 to /bin and made it my login shell...hmm..funny, now ftp-ing
with my username dumped core.  Updating /etc/shells immediately fixed
the problems.

Moral:  Not all the same problems are as obvious to fix on some systems.

___________

Iraq(){ xfer_territory(Iraq, Kuwait);		Chris Schanzle
	free(Kuwait);  num_countries--;		chris at suntan.ncsl.nist.gov