[comp.unix.questions] Dealing with dial-up lines

xev@hstbme.mit.edu (Xev Gittler) (02/18/88)

When a person dials in over a modem line, and then hangs up without
logging off, the computer should know enough to kill those processes,
right? (It should get a hangup signal?). Could someone suggest why on
my 4.3 system, peoples jobs would be just staying around, and the next
person that dials in to the same modem will come in in the middle of a
session?

					Xev Gittler
					xev@hstbme.mit.edu, or
					xev@athena.mit.edu

mikel@codas.att.com (Mikel Manitius) (02/18/88)

In article <2995@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, xev@hstbme.mit.edu (Xev Gittler) writes:
> [ ... ]                                  Could someone suggest why on
> my 4.3 system, peoples jobs would be just staying around, and the next
> person that dials in to the same modem will come in in the middle of a
> session?

This could be caused by a number of reasons, the most common
that come to mind are:

	a. You've got very old hardware that doesn't understand
	   hangups (ie: VAX dh boards, I beleive).

	b. For some reason, the processes are ingoring SIGHUP.

	c. A front end of some sort (ie: a port selector) that
	   isn't smart enough to tell the host the hangup occured.

	d. Badly configured, or cheap modems that don't drop DTR
	   when they lose carrier.

Also note that "init" won't clean up after the login, until the
child that it spwaned for that tty (presumably the login shell)
exists. So if it ignores hangups, he user won't logout.
-- 
					Mikel Manitius
					mikel@codas.att.com

bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (02/18/88)

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bucsd (berkeley-unix)



>When a person dials in over a modem line, and then hangs up without
>logging off, the computer should know enough to kill those processes,
>right? (It should get a hangup signal?). Could someone suggest why on
>my 4.3 system, peoples jobs would be just staying around, and the next
>person that dials in to the same modem will come in in the middle of a
>session?
>
>					Xev Gittler

(have you ever tried anonymous login to hstbme? it's, um, interesting,
in a minimalist kind of way.)

One of two things, probably the former. Either you don't have the bits
CLEAR in the tty mux line in the config file (flags 0x00, see the man
page) or you're not wired up correctly and the mux never
sees/hears/feels the hangup, or both.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (02/19/88)

Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bucsd (berkeley-unix)



>	a. You've got very old hardware that doesn't understand
>	   hangups (ie: VAX dh boards, I beleive).

Actually the dh supported an astounding amount of modem control not to
mention other configurations (20mA and some sort of "teletype"
interface etc.)  Unfortunately DEC never supported it on the VAX,
mostly they were used on "real" systems on DEC10's and 20's (BSD Unix
supported dh's on Vaxen, you could plug dh's in and they worked much
better than supported options due to modem control and real on-board
DMA buffering tho you usually got flak from field circus if they
broke, "we can't fix those, we only took your money cause we needed
it".)

The mux's they *did* support on the Vax were pretty weak on modem
control (DZ's were acceptable but had no DMA at all, DMF's came later
with DMA but 6 out of the 8 ports lacking any modem control, anything
after that wouldn't qualify as "older".) I don't know that anyone ever
ran DL's on a Vax, only the "E" had modem control (at the cost of
using an entire board for one serial line) as I remember, but they
were PDP-11 interfaces (I guess they could be run on a Vax Unibus,
maybe not enough address bits in the control registers to make them
practical.)

Anyhow, the answer to the question was the flag bits in his config
file (we spoke off-line), tho the other suggestions are always worth
checking.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University