[PLUG] A remote admin question

Mark Martin mmartin at u.washington.edu
Sun Mar 30 10:10:03 UTC 2003


On Thursday 27 March 2003 17:01, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   I'd like to understand why remotely logging off a user on another
> workstation could cause the monitor to become unresponsive without
> resetting that machine.
>
>   I'll ssh to the other workstation and, if my fiancee has not logged out
> after a couple of days, I'll kill the open application processes, then xfwm
> and her login. It used to work just fine.
>
>   Now, however, if I do that then there's no login prompt that comes up
> when we twiddle the trackball or press a key on the keyboard. It's dead and
> unresponsive. However, after resetting, it comes back up normally (but with
> my thanks for the journaling file system!). When logging out from that
> terminal, the problem doesn't appear. That is, the monitor goes into
> comatose mode after a while, but wakes up upon movement of the trackball or
> press of a key. I'm careful to not kill a system process (such as init) so
> I don't know why this lack of response occurs.
>
>   Any insight or thoughts?
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich
>
> Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
>
>                        Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
>             2404 SW 22nd Street | Troutdale, OR 97060-1247 | U.S.A.
>  + 1 503-667-4517 (voice) | + 1 503-667-8863 (fax) |
> rshepard at appl-ecosys.com http://www.appl-ecosys.com/
>
>
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> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

I can't tell you why the method you described causes trouble.  However, I 
thought I'd mention that just sending a SIGHUP to the X process, i.e.

kill -1 pid_of_X_process

or

kill -HUP pid_of_X_process

will log her off without having to kill all of those other processes 
individually.

Mark
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Mark A. Martin, Ph.D.
Applied Mathematics -- Software Development -- Systems Administration
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