Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 21:22:41 -0600 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com> To: rjk191@psu.edu Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: That telnetd bug Message-ID: <19991126212241.B74868@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9911262209170.30222-100000@rjk191.rh.psu.edu>; from "Ray Kohler" on Fri Nov 26 22:14:24 GMT 1999 References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9911262209170.30222-100000@rjk191.rh.psu.edu>
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In the last episode (Nov 26), Ray Kohler said: > Today I did something stupid and got hit by that well-known bug > wherein one runs a program under telnet and then kills telnetd, > causing the second program to go berserk. I was completely locked out > (due to lack of memory) for about 30 minutes, but then was able to > get back on and kill the offending program (cvsup). My question is: > How was it that I was able to get some RAM back without doing > anything first? After all, no programs had died, they had just > "quieted down". I very pleased at this surprise, but still... Why did > it happen? Note that this isn't a telnet bug; it's a bug in the application. You should always check the result of a read() for failure. I seem to remember tin and pine being the major problems, but they have long since been fixed. I've never seen this happen with cvsup, and loss of telnetd shouldn't even affect cvsup since it is not an interactive application anyway. As for the out of memeory issue, whenever the system runs out of RAM and swap, it will start killing processes. Usually the first process to die is the memory hog itself, which fixes the problem. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@emsphone.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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