The running of screen

It was thus said that the Great Doc once stated: Almost ten years ago [1] I'm in charge of keeping up an SGI Personal Iris 4D-35 running (at the time this happened) IRIX 4.0.1 (or 4.0.5, can't quite remember) and I had installed screen to allow me several sessions when dialling in (and since the dial in ports were sometimes flaky, screen would keep my session alive between disconnects). One of my users installed an IRC client [2] on the box. Didn't think much of it until I came in one day to find that IRIX had kernel paniced. I rebooted. A few days later the kernel had paniced again. I started getting suspicious and kept a close watch on what was running. A few days later it paniced. I talked to the user in question and had him do what I think he was doing and yup. Kernel panic. He would log into the system (from home), start screen. On one of the sessions, he would fire up IRC to log a certain channel [3], then disconnect (literally, hang up the phone) and leave screen and IRC running. For some reason, *that* combination would cause IRIX 4.0.1 to panic and crash the system. After that, I banned the use of IRC on the box. Which was okay, since he was the only one on that box to use IRC. To drive the point home, I changed ownership of the IRC client to root, and set the permissions to 000 [4]. I don't think I've used screen (which I've used under AIX, SunOS, Solaris and Linux) much since about '96 or '97. I (personally) don't find much need anymore. -spc (It's still a very cool program) [1] Seven to eight years ago. I started the job itself ten years ago, and the hardward/software is also ten years old (if not a bit older) so it's mostly on topic. [2] Which I didn't mind since it was installed in his account. My feelings towards installing software: if *I* used it, or two or more users wanted it, I installed it, otherwise you are on your own. [3] The X-Files IRC channel. He would log in just prior to the weekly show, start up IRC to log the channel during the show, and leave to watch the show, then read the logs afterwards. I'm not going to pretend to even understand this. [4] No disk quotas on the system. No real need to, for there were maybe half a dozen users of that system (including me), and about half of those users never bothered to really use the system.