by There's a [usually] low-frequency but annoying effect that's been affecting
our Solaris 2 systems for years (2.x for several different x; currently x=5
but I'm fairly sure the effect is still there in 2.6 as well). The utmp[x]
entries for xterm sessions occasionally get overwritten by entries for other
sessions, causing e.g. "logname" to give no output, rc=1, and so forth.
I have become fairly convinced that the effect is specific to xterm entries,
or nearly so. However it happened both with the entries created by xterm's
running setuid=root, but also by those created by utmp_update when xterm is
unprivileged, which is how we have things currently.
Has anyone else seen an effect like this? I have wondered whether to put some
effort into tracing all updates to /etc/utmp[x], but decided a question to
this newsgroup might be a little easier...
Chris Thompson Cambridge University Computing Service,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.