Dealing with dial-up lines

[Mikel Manitius]

In article <2995 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>, xev at hstbme.mit.edu (Xev Gittler) writes:
> [ ... ]                                  Could someone suggest why on
> my 4.3 system, peoples jobs would be just staying around, and the next
> person that dials in to the same modem will come in in the middle of a
> session?

This could be caused by a number of reasons, the most common
that come to mind are:

	a. You've got very old hardware that doesn't understand
	   hangups (ie: VAX dh boards, I beleive).

	b. For some reason, the processes are ingoring SIGHUP.

	c. A front end of some sort (ie: a port selector) that
	   isn't smart enough to tell the host the hangup occured.

	d. Badly configured, or cheap modems that don't drop DTR
	   when they lose carrier.

Also note that "init" won't clean up after the login, until the
child that it spwaned for that tty (presumably the login shell)
exists. So if it ignores hangups, he user won't logout.
-- 
					Mikel Manitius
					mikel at codas.att.com