strange su behaviour

strange su behaviour

[Nick Murtagh]

Hi

When I exit from su in X, it takes about 10 seconds to return
to the command prompt. This doesn't happen in console mode.
I'm using Mandrake 8.1.

This didn't happen in 
  2.4.17-mjc1

But does happen in
  2.4.18-pre7-ac2
  2.4.19-pre2

I know this is not exactly a major problem or anything, 
but it's starting to bug me :) 

Anyone got any ideas?

Nick

Re: strange su behaviour

[Nick Murtagh]

On Saturday 02 March 2002 09:08, Ville Herva wrote:
> Well, you could try to strace it to see where it lurks when it hangs.

The -r did the trick. Basically there was a bug in pam_xauth where it
was calling ftruncate with an un-initialised off_t length. Hence it
was trying to ftruncate a 34 byte file to > 100 megabytes. 

The ftruncate manpage says that the behaviour in this circumstance is
undefined. I will investigate further to see why different kernel
versions are acting differently here.

Thanks for your help.

Nick