[K12OSN] what causes runaway processes?

Rob Owens hick518 at yahoo.com
Thu Mar 10 11:37:13 UTC 2005


My terminal locked up the other day and I had to hit
the reset button.  Afterwards, there were still
processes running on the server from that
locked-up-and-reset session.  Does anybody know what
the root cause of this is?  

I know there's been a lot of discussion about how to
kill these processes, but I'm more interested in
stopping them from occurring in the first place (if
that's even possible).  Is this a problem with GDM? 
Or does it happen with other display managers?

OpenSSH has protection against this sort of thing, and
I wonder if it could be integrated into the thin
client model.  By default, the ssh server will kill
all processes owned by a remote user if that user's
connection gets broken.  Seems like ltsp could use
this sort of functionality.

Here's the option description of this feature, taken
from "man sshd_config":  (sorry if the formatting is
poor)

     TCPKeepAlive
             Specifies whether the system should send
TCP keepalive messages
             to the other side.  If they are sent,
death of the connection or
             crash of one of the machines will be
properly noticed.  However,
             this means that connections will die if
the route is down tempo-
             rarily, and some people find it annoying.
 On the other hand, if
             TCP keepalives are not sent, sessions may
hang indefinitely on
             the server, leaving ``ghost'' users and
consuming server
             resources.

             The default is ``yes'' (to send TCP
keepalive messages), and the
             server will notice if the network goes
down or the client host
             crashes.  This avoids infinitely hanging
sessions.

             To disable TCP keepalive messages, the
value should be set to
             ``no''.



		
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