Strange behavior of su

[P. D. Guthrie]

In article <314 at aphasia.UUCP> gww at aphasia.UUCP (George Williams) writes:
>We are running bsd4.2 on a vax 750.
>
>Every now and then after I have been logged in for a while I will try to
>su, have su ask the password, and then it sits for a bit and exits.  It
>does not generate any error messages, the exit status is 0.  After this
>has happened it will keep happening until I log out, I have always been
>able to su immediately after logging in.
>
>Anyone else had this? Anyone know why?
>
>			    George Williams
>			    decvax!frog!aphasia!gww

I had this happen almost all the time on a 4.1 system. However it only
happened when I su'd to a non-root user. Curiouser and curiouser....
I never did try to track it down, but I would be interested to know
what it was. Anyone?

				Paul Guthrie
				ihnp4!ihdev!pdg