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wrong !
you get somthing like:
init: process xdm is spawning too fast, disbaled for 5 minutes
and you can use a virtual terminal to reconfigure X
regards
erez.
Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> >
> > I always considered Run Level 5 as a very bad idea, which I'll never want
> > to use.
>
> The most common argument against using xdm at startup ("runlevel 5" [1] is
> that if you change the hardware or the settings the X server may fail to
> load and then you get an infinite loop where the X server starts to load
> (and takes the virtual console "focus") but immediately fails.
>
> In serious cases the X server may even freeze the display, but this rarely
> happens.
>
> Since this is such a common problem, there are widely-available
> work-arounds.
>
> One possibility is that if the script that runs the X server gets to
> execute the X server too many times in, say, 5 minutes, it will ask the
> user whether to contnue. This has been implemented, for instance, in
> Mandrake since 7.<something>
>
> Latest debian X server packages have something more sophisticated: if the
> X server fails, the user is dropped into a console-based menu that
> suggests some alternatives (I'm not sure how they encounter false
> negatives, if there are any)
>
> > However, I recently run into a dillema here at the Computer
> > Networks farm. If I start X from the console and lock it, then a
> > malicious user can switch to the console from which it was invoked,
> > press Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Z and gain my permissions.
> >
> > Naturally, there are ways to overcome it:
> >
> > 1. Using vlock -a on one of the virtual consoles. This renders the
> > computer useless except for telnetting/sshing into.
> >
> > 2. Using screen to run "startx" in the background. This will require to
> > hack a simple shell alias to do in style. However, I noticed that using it
> > my sound eventaully became non-functional for some reason. It's probably a
> > bug of some sort, but I have better things to do with my time than to try
> > and sort it out.
> >
> > 3. Using Run-Level 5. That way, no virtual console are needed to invoke
> > the X-server.
>
> Do you have control over that (root permissions?
>
> 4. Block Ctrl-Break and Ctrl-Z in that script (not exactly sure how, rtfm
> bash/tcsh)
>
> [1] "runlevel 5" is where redhat (and following it some other distros,
> like Mandrake). I believe that SuSE and debian have both runlevel 3
> for graphical login. Debian has gdm, kdm (and even xdm and wdm...) as
> init.d services.
>
> --
> Tzafrir Cohen
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
>
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