From: juphoff@Mr-Hyde.aoc.nrao.edu (Uppie) Subject: ntalk caused infinite core dump! (on 2 different systems) whatsup? Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 03:07:03 GMT
The oddest thing happened a couple of nights ago...A fellow linux user
telnetted into my machine as a guest, and we started talk. The
disk fired up and the system slowed to a crawl...I thought maybe the
kernel had flipped out and started paging like mad...I also thought I
was going to have to *gulp* do a hard reset. Well, it took forever,
but I got logged in on another virtual console (the system only acknowleged
a keystroke every few seconds....made me wish I used shorter passwords)
and managed to do a clean shutdown. When i rebooted, I had
a core dump in the guest account home directory that was over 70 MEGABYTES
big! I had only about 2MB left on my root partiton. (Much longer and
it would've been back to the old 'a1' disk to boot and clean things up.)
Once I got the system back up and my SLIP connection started, I telnetted
into his linux machine as a guest (accountname 'test') and tried talking
to him. Once he started talk, the same thing happened on his system.
(Don't know the size of his core dump, but I do know that he had to reboot.)
I'm running a Gateway 386DX/33 w/i387, 8MB RAM, no BIOS shadowing.
0.99.10 with net-2, slip via dip, and the ntalk and ntalkd that came
with net-2 (or the one with SLS 1.02--not sure if net-2 changed the
SLS one...in any case I haven't and it's the same one as anyone else
using SLS 1.02 and net-2 with pl10).
The command I used was 'talk guest', which is a soft-link to ntalk.
The other system was, if I recall correctly, a no-name 486/50 (not sure
of memory size or anything). It was also running 0.99.10 and net-2.
If anyone else has had this happen, I'd appreciate the email. (And if
anyone is brave enough to try it themself, I'd recommend having
a pre-typed 'shutdown -h now' command ready on another virtual
console, so the only keystroke needed to stop the madness would be
'enter'.)
-- Jeff Uphoff -- "Uppie" | "The secret to good teaching is sincerity. As uphoff@astro.psu.edu | soon as you learn to fake that, you've got it juphoff@nrao.edu | made."