[ale] Re: Respawning to fast

[Robert G. Fisher]

On Fri, 21 Jun 1996, Doug Ledford wrote:

> Usually one of two reasons for this.  First, the modem is hard locked and 
> won't reset or respond to mgetty without power cycling the modem.  
> Second, someone found out your number and is trying to hack into your 
> system, or they have the number and an account, but forgot their 
> password.  After too many repeated attempts to log in without success and 
> getting disconnected, init will think the mgetty is looping in some 
> fasion because it is respawning so often and issue the warning you see 
> and disable the mgetty line for five minutes.

Well any other reasons why this might occur?  I see this several times a
day on my system, and am curious to some other reasons... I noticed one
response that says "this is NOT normal"  umm... maybe it's not normal in
an enviroment where people are used to logging into a UNIX system and
are well aware of their userid and password and actually understand this
stuff, but in our case this is rarely true of the clients...

Any suggestions on things that can be done to help prevent this from
ocurring other than the unacceptable option of just commenting out all
modem entries from inittab :-)

Robert G. Fisher		     NEOCOM Microspecialists Inc. 
System Administrator/Programmer      (540) 666-9533 x 116
rfisher at neocomm.net