[9151] in Athena Bugs
RS/6000 pty problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Wed Apr 1 09:39:11 1992
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 92 09:38:52 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
We have been experiencing problems on the SIPB's RS/6000, rosebud,
with pty's getting screwed up in a way that prevents rlogin from
working properly.
Apparently, some program(s) that is/are commonly run on rosebud is
allocating, using and freeing pty's in a way that is rendering them
unuseable to rlogin later. We suspect either xterm, emacs or both.
When a user tries to rlogin and is assigned one of the broken pty's,
sometimes it spews a bunch of garbage on the screen, sometimes it says
"locuser is more than 8 characters", and then rejects the login.
Usually, running one or more telnet's to rosebud, suspending them, and
retrying the rlogin will grab the broken pty for long enough for it to
work.
If xterm and emacs are at fault in their pty allocation, we would like
to see them fixed. It is very inconvenient to watch all of the pty's
gradually become unusuable until the machine has to be rebooted
because no one can log into it.
jik
