RLOGIN to SUN Hangs (Ultrix 4.0)

[Steve D. Miller]

It was my understanding (from having had it happen to me, though only once
or twice) that there is a bug in the SunOS 4.0.3 (and, probably, SunOS
4.0.X, but supposedly fixed in SunOS 4.1 and later) pseudo-tty code that
would keep ptys from being reused properly.  If memory serves, if someone
logs out and leaves a process attached to the pty they're using, that pty
becomes unusable, but things that allocate ptys don't know that (since they
can open the tty, they assume it's OK to use), so they open the pty and then
wedge.

It's entirely possible that I'm getting the description of the bug wrong;
since I haven't seen it in action often (we have only one SunOS 4.0.X
machine), I haven't spent much time figuring out what's going on.  I do know
that there was a bug of this sort under SunOS 4.0.X (for some values of X),
and that one of the behaviors one saw was hangs when doing remote logins to
Suns.  So you might want to upgrade your Sun to SunOS 4.1 or later (or call
Sun Customer Support and get the pty fix) and see if the problem goes away.

I know that I was able to log in just now from a DS5000/200 running Ultrix
4.0 to a SPARCstation 1+ running SunOS 4.1, though if the problem is
intermittent, I'm not sure that proves anything.

	-Steve

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