To anyone who might have more of a clue than I on
this matter:
UNCONTROLLED COMSAT SPAWNING
Yesterday one of the users on our Alpha 3400S reported to me that he was
unable to log in - the reason turned out to be that he had 200+ comsats
running, all of them started progressively (ie., not all at once) over the
preceding 6 hours or so. I killed off the processes, and he could log on.
Six more hours later, another report of the same thing. I killed off 176
more comsats and looked into the problem. I scoured the system for any
process with his UID attached to it and killed them off (orphaned processes
on our Alpha are common, it seems, and so he had several just lying around).
I restarted inetd. The comsats are still being generated - but only in large
number for this particular user, as before. He is receiving large amounts of
mail, but other people also receive sizable quantities of mail with no such
problem. This appears to be independent of biff's being on or off in the
shells he runs. I have never seen this in many years as a sys op.
I'm at a loss. This morning there were another 100-odd comsats of his lying
around. Mail for him continues to pour in, but last night while monitoring
for an hour a dozen messages came in for him and no comsats were generated.
He must have tried to log in since then, perhaps, and gave the comsat server
something to try and contact. I don't know. Any useful ideas? We run DU
3.2c, we do not use Advfs, and a user base of some 30-50 logged on at any one
time, mostly running XDM sessions.
Chris
======================================================
Christopher C Stevenson C3004 (709) 737-2624
Dept. of Physics & Physical Oceanography
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John's, Newfoundland, CANADA A1B 3X7
URL:
http://www.physics.mun.ca/~csteven
Received on Wed May 29 1996 - 14:53:59 NZST