> At random times, I'm simply logged out. And it got really bad > just a few moments ago. All vt's where were closed down and > a new login prompt appeared. While this was going on, my hard-drive > lit up and started spinning like Linux was reading my whole disk > over and over again. Even when I tried to login and try to ps -ax > and kill whatever was happening, I could only get as far the the > motd...no shell prompt...before I was logged back off again. > I finally had to hit reset and re-boot the computer.
Hmm, I am grasping at straws here, but it seems that perhaps you are the victim of somebody hacking in to your system. You realize that whenever a Unix system is on the Net (via PPP or whatever) outsiders can telnet in, FTP in, etc. unless you specifically disable those services. If you don't have good passwords set, this could be the problem. You may be the victim of a a "fork bomb" which basically takes up so much CPU processor time and swap space that everything else grinds to a halt...and it would be possible for such a thing to cause a logout (the behaviour of *any* OSs when all resources are maxed out is generally unpredictable). First thing you need to do is make sure that nobody has access to crontab and that you are not running the "at" program (which can let people run these nasty things at various scheduled times.) Then you will probably want to disable allowing incoming telnet, rlogin, rsh, ftp, and finger connections. You can do this by editing /etc/inetd.conf file. Now I may be totally off on this and it could be a different problem. As I said, I am grasping at straws. But it won't hurt you to make your system a bit mroe secure anyway :-) -- John Goerzen | System administrator & owner, The Communications Custom programming | Centre and Complete Network (complete.org) [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Free Unix shell access, 316-367-8490 w/ your modem. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
