I was on IRC last night and received a few comments and came up
with idea of getty and the shell fighting for control of the tty.
In regards to having "open()" slide past "revoke()" I have heard a
lot of reports from friends of mine that when they logout they
jam and pound on their keyboards, and between the time their login
shell dies and getty is supposed to re-spawn, they get a nice
root prompt to play with. This is on HP/UX 9.00 and 10.00, BTW.
-Jon MacMurray College Sophomore * OpenBSD Enthusiast * T. Sax
-=+ Systems Administrator && Webmaster of corinne.mac.edu +=-
jkatz@corinne.mac.edu * http://corinne.mac.edu * http://jon.katz.com
root@corinne.mac.edu Custom systems and network design for businesses
"OpenBSD: high performance computing for high performance people."
On Wed, 18 Jun 1997 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
:I have to admit that it's 4AM, and I'm not an HP/UX expert, but I suspect the
:follwoing is happening:
:
:When the other sysadmin does a 'kill -9' or whatever of the *parent shell*,
:this is failing to propagate a SIGHUP to the shell spawned by the su command
:(which makes sense, as it is probablyin a different process group for job
:control purposes). The login shell exits, the su-shell keeps running.
:init notices the login shell exiting, and re-spawns a getty. You then
:get a getty/login and a su-shell fighting in a race condition for any
:given line of terminal input.