comsat and biff

[Barry Roskuski]

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.  I
>think this is comsat's fault, but I can't check because Pyramid's

    We have had 2 problems at our site. The one you describe, and 
    people not getting biff'ed at all when they should be. Apparently,
    the SIGALRM that comsat uses to keep it's list of logged on users
    up to date stops going off for an unexplained reason, and the configuration
    gets 'frozen' (In our case, the *other users* that the people get biff'ed
    for are people who were logged on to the terminal at some point in
    the past). A "kill -ALRM pid" (where pid is the pid of comsat) puts
    it back in synch.

                                    Hope this helps.
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Barry J. Roskuski                   Mirror Systems
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