On Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:08:43 -0400, Ken Hornstein said:
True story: a long time ago we had a number of IRIX systems. The inetd on those systems was buggy so it was common when you changed the inetd configuration you just restarted it instead of sending it a HUP signal. But even though the person who did this had su'd to root, some of their user environment variables were inherited by their root shell and then inherited by inetd ... and those made it down into various daemons spawned by inetd which caused a whole bunch of confusing behavior at login time.
This behavior wasn't limited to IRIX or inetd. It could bite you on anything that used sysvinit or other schemes that had /etc/rc*.d/S34foobar scripts, where 'service foobar restart' would run the script inline. One particularly difficult to debug issue was an occasional hang of one of our Oracle databases. Finally tracked it down to part of the nightly automation which did the backups - it would wait till it got an e-mail saying the *previous* night's backup ran so it was safe to re-use the checkpoint area for this night's backup. Worked fine till one day I restarted Legato Networker around 1PM - and from there on all the "Your backup completed" mails went out as valdis@backupserver rather than root@backupserver... Whoops. :) (And yes, I did convince the DBAs to come up with a less brittle way of doing their nightlies. :)
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