Massacre

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From: Yossi Kreinin
Subject: Massacre
Date: 17:56 on 09 Jan 2007
During the last weekend, X running on my Linux desktop crashed, taking about 5 
ssh sessions (spawned for running about 50000 automated tests) with it. My 
admins refused to believe that (no messages in some log file). The fact that 
Alt-F7 showed a textual login prompt, and Firefox (started after running xinit 
and /some/path/startkde or the like) detected a corpse of it's twin, asking if I 
wanted it to continue the nuked sessions, and the ashes of my test script 
processes (in the form of log files last modified at about 4 AM) were not 
convincing enough. Who knows - maybe I didn't /notice/ my X. "What's your 
(mandatory due to a 'security policy') screen-locking screensaver?". "A black 
screen, obviously". "Hmmm..."

Speaking of black screens, after restarting and fscking some of the fs, the 
machine displayed one good one. It also refused to react to peripheral devices 
(I tried a keyboard, a mount and a ping). And then I pushed a nice biggish gray 
button, which is the best peripheral device on this machine.

Anyway, no more ssh sessions outside of screen. I have a dying local machine and 
deadlines, that's more than enough death, I don't need dead remote processes. 
screen works pretty good, especially when I `setenv TERM xterm` to satisfy 
hordes of brain-crippled statements scattered throughout my .fuckrc files which 
I copied from other people and never understood. It wouldn't respond to things 
like Shift-Page Up to view large chunks of stdout, but I never counted on shell 
sessions to survive for too long, so luckily I also have all those log files to 
grep. But I'd still be happy to find out there's a workaround.

I saw a Mac laptop today. GUI without X. Inspiring. I think I'll go take a 
photograph.

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