SUMMARY: DISPLAY Vanishing in OpenWindows

From: Mike Jipping (jipping@frodo.cs.hope.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 18 1991 - 15:04:49 CST


Many thanks to the net! My original question:

> After running OpenWindows for a while, connections
> to the display suddenly don't work. This typically happens after
> OpenWindows has been running for an extended period -- say 3 to 4 days --
> without being restarted. Programs that work fine when I leave work will
> bomb the next morning.

The answer is that we have a root process started by cron that deletes
any file in /tmp that's over 3 days old. In addition to deleting all the
legitimate files, this process was also removing the unix-domain socket
in /tmp/.NeWS-unix and /tmp/.X11-unix, thus causing new connections to
":0.0" or "unix:0.0" to stop working. To add to the confusion,
connections to "`hostname`:0.0" still work because the TCP socket is not
in the /tmp namespace.

Making the process overlook the sockets in question has fixed the problem.

Thanks to the following who responded:

   Liudvikas Bukys <bukys@cs.rochester.edu>
   shipley@remarque.berkeley.edu
   Ian MacPhedran <macphed@dvinci.usask.ca>
   Dave Sill <de5@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov>
   mark galbraith <mark@deltam.com>
   Randy Garrett <rlg@ida.org>
   Sue Bergquist <sueb@vice.ico.tek.com>

      Mike Jipping
      Hope College Department of Computer Science
      jipping@cs.hope.edu (BITNET: JIPPING@HOPE)

      "If is was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be.
       But as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
                                              -- Lewis Carroll



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