Problem with dxconsole consuming disk

From: Malcolm Dunnett <dunnett_at_mala.bc.ca>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 1996 08:37:50 PST

  I'm having a problem with disk quotas and a runaway dxconsole process.

  It seems a user decided to see what would happen if he ran a second
copy of dxsession from a terminal window. One of the things that
apparently happens is that dxconsole goes nuts, consuming all available
cpu time to continually write an error message into .xsession-errors.

  To make matters even worse, disk quotas are not honored by this
process, so after the error file hits the users quota it just keeps on
going until the entire file system is full. Even at that point it
keeps trying, so any space one manages to free on the volume is
quickly consumed again.

  It seems to me there are 2 problems here:

  1.) dxconsole should die gracefully in this situation, not consume
a disk.

  2.) it should honor the users disk quota ( so at worst the single user
who caused the problem would be inconvenienced, rather than doing a
pretty good emulation of a denial of service attack ).

  Is there something I can put in the application-defaults file for
dxconsole to make it behave? Is there a way to configure the system so
that dxconsole doesn't bypass quota? Has this been fixed in a later
release (we're running 3.2a ).

  Thanks for any advice.

=============================================================================
Malcolm Dunnett Malaspina University-College Email: dunnett_at_mala.bc.ca
Computer Services Nanaimo, B.C. CANADA V9R 5S5 Tel: (250)755-8738
Received on Tue Nov 05 1996 - 18:19:13 NZDT

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