The AFS login program has an irritating feature which causes
trouble when there are networking problems. It frequently
happens that our machines lose network connections completely.
Under these circumstances we have special system administration
accounts that allow us to log in and repair things, accounts
with passwords in /etc/passwd. Unfortunately the AFS login
program tries to contact the authentication data base, fails,
and times out after 300 seconds without looking at the passwd
file. In such circumstances, all I can do is reboot the machine
by powering off, bringing it up in single user mode. It would
be better if the AFS login, after timing out, checked the local
passwd file before aborting completely.
-- Owen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
