[1933] in athena10
pagbug workaround
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Sun Mar 29 00:16:21 2009
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:15:21 -0400
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: linerva@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20090329041521.GE21912@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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I've largely sat out on the pursuit of our PAG bug, partly because I'm
preoccupied lately with XVM's own awful encounters with bugs.
It's now been about three weeks that we've been wrestling with it. I
count a dozen users that we've seen confused by it either on sipb@ or
linerva@, which probably means at least a hundred users that were
confused and either worked around or wrote us off.
While we continue to debug and try to get the problem fixed properly,
I think it's therefore time to look at workarounds that will stem the
flood of unhappy users.
For example, Mitch suggested putting "aklog" in the system dotfiles.
Specifically, the command could be appended to /etc/csh.login and
/etc/bash.bashrc. That will mean that when a user logs in, they get
tokens, which would have avoided most of the user frustration we've
seen.
Anders correctly points out that this is only a workaround, not a
solution; for example, if a user logs in twice and logs out once they
lose tokens in their remaining login. We should still try to solve
the problem.
I think we should implement this or another workaround tomorrow unless
there are serious problems I haven't noticed.
Greg
