Problems with rlogin

[mac at esl.UUCP]

In article <1904 at mcc-pp.UUCP> ables at mcc-pp.UUCP (King Ables) writes:
>> 	Recently, a strange problem has cropped up with rlogin.  We've got
>> a Vax-11/750 running 4.2BSD and a bunch of Sun-3's running Sun 3.0 Unix.
>> One of our Sun-3/50's (adenine) can't rlogin to the vax.  It used to work
>> fine, but then for no apparant reason it stopped working.  Rebooting
>> adenine seemed to have fixed the problem, but then it came back.  The
>> symptoms are:
>
>I've seen the same problem here.  The only clue I've had the time
>to find is that it has something to do with a process left around
>from an old login.  If I rlogin to my Vax from a Sun3 and something
>happens (the window dies, or you quit suntools w/o logging out, perhaps,
>I don't know because I haven't been able to reproduce it) then you
>get a job hanging around on the Vax that says it's coming from the
>Sun, but the sun no longer has it.  Once you kill the process on the
>vax, then you can rlogin from the sun again.  It's almost as if something
>is saying "no, you already have one of those, you can't have two"
>which is crazy since you can have multiple rlogins from a sun under
>normal circumstances.
>
>We haven't had time to try to figure it out and since we have a
>work-around now, it hasn't been a big inconvenience (it only
>happens rarely, anyway).  However, I'd sure love to know why it does.
>
>-King
>ARPA: ables at mcc.com
>UUCP: {gatech,ihnp4,nbires,seismo,ucbvax}!ut-sally!im4u!milano!mcc-pp!ables
>-------
>UNPARALLELED SERVICE means they can only do one thing at a time.

There are a number of strange things going on in configurations of Sun,
suntools, and rlogin.  You sun users have seen the occasional lockup of ptys
follow sun through Sun 100U's running Sun 1.0 through Sun 3/180's running
3.1FCS.  (I mean you do a w and see strange descriptions of users on some of
the ptys:

User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU  what
amp      p3board   2:13pm  1:43   1:32     16  -csh 
amp      pty2      4:38pm238:48 123:92 123:21  - 7%4( %^
mac      ttyp3     4:35pm         6:44   4:35  w

A reboot cleans these up.  Until a reboot, users attempting to vi get wierd
window sizes (indeed, anything accessing window sizes over ptys gets strange
data -- this includes people logged in over ethernet.)

Any one know a better fix than L1 A ( or shutdown -r 5 Resetting Sun :-)?

An aside: we had a real weird one the other day.  One sun ( a Sun 3/180 )
wouldn't boot - the vmunix file was trashed -- hard disk errors on the xy0a
partion.  We booted it from tape, as it couldn't run /genvmunix 
( a good idea, save a copy of the generic /vmunix as something like
/genvmunix on each of your machines, so you could boot off that if vmunix got
86'ed)
as the file system xy0a wouldn't pass fsck.  Then I backed up the other xy0
partions, for safe keeping, and ran the SMD stand alone fix command on 
just the blocks of the xy0a partion.  I then copied xy0a back in from backup
tape, and booted the machine.  Everything worked fine, EXCEPT rlogin from
another machine to this machine.  I got an error "getxfile: swap problems in
getting file" or some such.  I thought maybe rlogind was bad, so I copied
another one to /usr, and ran that one instead of /etc/rlogind.  Same problem.

So I ran fix on the swap partion, and it found errors there also. Great, I
thought. That's why there was the getxfile error message. 

Same problem.  Did an nm on /vmunix, and getxfile was in the kernal. Hmm,
probably wasn't rlogind causing the problem.  

Bit the bullet, shutdown the machine, and ran fix on the whole disk. Went
home. Came in the next day, re loaded unix on it, then restored /usr.
Things are all fine now.  Perhaps partial fixes are not recommended.
It looked so promising in the manual, though.  Just reformat a piece, not the
whole thing.

Anyway. Cheers

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