daveg@near.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) (02/27/90)
I just had an interesting experience on the Internet. Can anyone explain the following story? I'd been talking on and off with a person at mua.usu.edu in Utah using the "talk" command. I was on csvax.caltech.edu, a 4.2BSD machine. Each time I got the "connection requested by xxx@mua.usu.edu" message I typed the talk command to reply. So far, so good. At eight minutes to midnight I get another talk request, and respond as usual. He says hi, I say hi, he says "what do you need", and I say "what do YOU need?". Presently it develops that this is some totally different person who has never heard of me or my machine! Looking back at the Talk_Daemon message I had copy/pasted I see he is at alcor.usc.edu, which is a few miles away here in Southern California. I ask, "are you sure you weren't trying to talk to me?" He responds, "no, I wasn't talking to anyone; I was just sitting here telnetting to Utah." Oh. Sure enough, he was connected to mua.usu.edu. My friend in Utah has logged off now, but I presume he tried to talk to me and somehow his network software used this other guy's address instead of its own address. Or did the Internet link between Utah and California bundle us together somehow? Ideas, anyone? -- Dave -- Dave Gillespie 256-80 Caltech Pasadena CA USA 91125 daveg@csvax.caltech.edu, ...!cit-vax!daveg
roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (02/28/90)
daveg@near.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes: > At eight minutes to midnight I get another talk request, and respond as > usual [...] My friend in Utah has logged off now, but I presume he tried > to talk to me and somehow his network software used this other guy's > address instead of its own address. We've seen similar sorts of things on our machines. There are various flavors, all of them involving in one way or another failure to properly release a pty. We once had (I think on our Vax, when we were running 4.2BSD) a situation where you would rlogin to the machine and get connected to somebody's old login session. I've seen this on occasion with various systems. There is one NCR Tower around here to which I can remember once telnetting to and being surprised to see, instead of the usual login prompt, just "# "! A more common thing on our SunOS-3.5.2 suns is related to talk and suntools not properly cleaning up after itself when you close a shelltool window abruptly. Lets say I quit suntools without C-D'ing all my shelltools. If you run w, it will appear that I'm still logged in. Now, if somebody tries to talk to me, they just get an endless stream of "ringing your party again..." messages. They get fed up with this and C-C their talk. When I next log in, I get a "connection requested by ..." message pop up in my console window. Of course, when I respond to the connection request, the person denies trying to talk to me and thinks I initiated the conversation. The same (I think!) suntools pty bug also sometimes causes CCA emacs to go into an endless loop, if you leave an emacs running in a shelltool window and just quit suntools. We've never tracked it down exactly, but I'm sure the emacs is just looping doing a read(), and not recognizing that it read 0 characters as EOF. Possibly it's doing this in the middle of a non dismissable "do you want to save this file before exiting?" type of thing. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"