[lug] Weird su/sudo/login/ssh/mail problem

[Bear Giles]

> > I am simple country folk, I can only afford a 'grep'.  It's "/dev/log",
> > without leading spaces.  Unless 'strings' truncates any leading spaces
> > itself.
> 
> People who can 'read' perl should have Perl :-)  (BTW, how can you run
> Debian without Perl, isn't that like MS-Windows without explorer?).

Fine.  I'm lazy and didn't see a reason to bother with it just to have
a pretty framing message.  I have a short attention span, but it's not
*that* short!

> That funny path got me sidetracked - it shows up in traces on my Debian
> system as well (need more time to investigate that ...). 

The only thing I can think of is that it's something like
"%16.16s" formatting.  That's great for truncating long paths,
but ambigious since some of us are jerks who would do

 $ mkdir  "          "
 $ mkdir  "          /dev"
 $ touch  "          /dev/log"

just to drive the local "MSIE but I read 'Teach Yourself Linux in 21 Days!'"
expert bonkers.  The inevitably retaliate by deleting the offending file
with rm -rf          *, carefully typing all of the spaces but forgetting
the quotes.  (Need I say :-) ?)

> Hmm, looks likes some of  my Debian boxes have /dev/log as a socket
> of type SOCK_STREAM (like yours), some have SOCK_DGRAM
> This might explain the blocking behaviour.  

Kinda.  Streams can block and take the system down with them (witness
my problems), while datagrams can't.  It makes a lot of sense to 
preferentially use datagrams here.

> but why would that be a problem on your box? 

No idea - it should be possible for multiple processes to open the
same Unix socket.  So even if there's a bad player who's opening
the socket directly it shouldn't be locking out everyone else.

Bear