[17067] in Athena Bugs
Re: 8.3.15 for Sparc5 ticket caching?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Aug 17 10:27:42 1999
Message-Id: <199908171427.KAA00629@rcn-sucks.fsck.com>
To: Jonathan McIndoe Hunt <jmhunt@MIT.EDU>
cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:43:14 EDT."
<199908171343.JAA05260@melbourne-city-street.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:27:01 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
This is not a new bug; we've had this bug since the very beginning of
Athena as far as I know. The problem occurs when you log in while the
machine is reactivating (reactivating happens once every five minutes
when no one is logged in and usually lasts some smallish number of
seconds). The reactivate script does a number of things which mess
with the state of a user login (destroying session records and
tickets, mainly).
Fixing the race with 100% certainty is hard, but some day we'll
probably at least set /etc/nologin during the reactivate. (This is
not a 100% fix because login checks /etc/nologin before it adds the
user to the utmp file, so if we set /etc/nologin during that window a
user could still slip past and log in during the reactivation.) Even
that requires some careful attention to detail, though, so it will
probably be a while.
There, more than you probably wanted to know. In the mean time,
having to occasionally log out and back in is only a small nuisance.
