benedict@bowen.utexas.edu (Thomas Benedict) (06/20/91)
Several times over the past two months, our 4D/80 has mysteriously disabled logins. The last time it happened, someone was running emacs. Even after the weirdness started, he could still use emacs, could still save, etc. But as soon as he quit emacs, he couldn't restart it. As soon as he logged out, he couldn't log back in. Like the previous times, the reset button was hit. This morning I caught our machine in the act. A look at "ps -eaf" showed 18 copies of /usr/etc/inetd running. That seemed somewhat strange to me. So I tried it again. 19 copies. It turns out they were spawning pretty quickly. By the time I finally rebooted the machine there were 25 copies. During this time I tried to run some programs. It seemed like everything which used the network at all refused to start. This made sense with all of the inetd daemons running, but was really annoying. For instance, who would work, but finger wouldn't. So I had a hard time finding out how long some of the remote logins were idle. I tried to talk to one guy to ask what shell he was running, but talk wouldn't work. Nor would mail (I was getting kinda ticked by now). When I figured it was time to cut losses and get this thing back up and running I found out that rlogin, telnet, and su were busted as well. This one was another reset button restart. Has anyone else had similar problems? What would cause inetd to spawn off like that? Tom Benedict benedict@chaos.utexas.edu Center for Nonlinear Dynamics