hang on exit bug under Linux

[carl at bl.echidna.id.au]

> From: Peter Stuge <stuge at cdy.org>
> 
> The true solution is considered to be one of two things:
> 
> 1. All daemons shall behave.  (ie. close std*)

Ideally, but not likely :(

> 2. The user knows what he/she wants.  (ie. to exit, loosing data)
> 
> I actually want both.  I want to be able to tell sloppy daemon programmers
> that they should clean up their code.  But I also want my users to not have
> to deal with sloppy daemon programmers, unless they choose to do so.
> This is tough.

Could it be done at the command line?  ssh -bad-daemon foohost ?

We have to restart Firewall-1 and IDS probes with closed source
all the time using ssh.  Having the ability to do so without
totally hosing things is a big plus.  It's not something I can
script around either.

> A thought that occured in my mind tonight while thinking about this is that
> the ssh client could background itself and tell the user about it, instead
> of closing down and causing possible data loss.  And it needs to leave std*
> open, ie. not daemonize, but background.  This would propagate over multiple
> connections all the way back to my actual terminal.  And if I choose to
> close my terminal (xterm, console, whatever) the process that I started at
> remotehost will be sent SIGHUP.  In the perl case it would kill it, a C
> program that catches the signal doesn't care and keeps running.  Data will
> be lost but that is out of SSH scope.
> 
> Comments on this, anyone?

Is it too hard to have a command line switch (or config option) to say
"lossy/not lossy" ?  It's because of this problem that I'm still stuck
with a lot of firewalls still running ssh v1 :(

Carl