Strange problem with /etc/mtab

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1990Feb17.023003.7444 at phri.nyu.edu> roy at phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>	This is pretty typical.  It's obviously a message from compress
>somewhere in the news system, and indeed this only started happening when we
>put C news up.  Damned if I can figure out how it gets into my mtab file.

We've heard some strange C News problem reports, but this really takes the
cake! :-)

>... must have been sometime during the time /etc/rc was
>being run....  At this time, there shouldn't be
>any news stuff running, other than /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsboot, which
>just removes a few dead lock and temp files.

Which variant of rnews are you running, rnews.batch or rnews.immed?  If
the latter, that could explain how it gets started up at that time:  when
you went down, there was incoming news in a uucp queue, and /etc/rc is
starting up uuxqt, which hands the incoming batch to rnews, which tries
to run newsrun, which produces the message.  One might perhaps get something
similar with NNTP, although I'm not very familiar with the details of how
it runs.  (Geoff is on vacation.)

As for how the message ends up in /etc/mtab... that's a bit of a puzzle,
all right.  However, I note that many /etc/rc's have ">/etc/mtab" somewhere
to null out mtab during boot.  If that is somehow being taken by your shell
as a request to divert stdout or stderr into /etc/mtab, that could explain
how a message from a child of /etc/rc got into /etc/mtab.  I admit that
I'd have a hard time explaining it in more detail!  Investigation seems
in order.
-- 
"The N in NFS stands for Not, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
or Need, or perhaps Nightmare"| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu