comsat and biff

[David Beard]

In article <74984 at pyramid.pyramid.com> csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
> In article <17033 at bellcore.bellcore.com> tr at ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) writes:
>>On one of our two Pyramids, users get biff messages for other users.
>
> Yeah, this seems to happen from time to time, in little bursts. I'm not sure
> what causes it. The folks at Cal Poly have narrowed it down quite a bit; if I
> could find an environment where it occurs consistently I could nail it. We're
> running the plain 4.3BSD comsat, with no hacking done to it, so it's probably
> some kind of portability problem, e.g., dereferencing a NULL pointer. It is
> definitely a problem in scanning /etc/utmp.

We had that problem on our Pyramid 9820 system here at Adelaide University a few
months ago after we upgraded from OSx4.0 to 4.4.  One of the changes in 4.4 was
a fix that supported more than 64 pseudo terminal devices.  To take advantage of
this, I created extra pty's (using makedev) and included the new devices in
/etc/ttys /etc/ttytype and /etc/u_ttytype.  What I forgot to do was add entries
in /etc/inittab.  After fixing this, the problem disappeared.

Hope this helps.
--
beard at spam.ua.oz.au
David Beard
University of Adelaide
GPO Box 498 Adelaide
South Australia, 5001