Money trouble at OpenBSD

Posted Mar 30, 2006 7:09 UTC (Thu) by djm (subscriber, #11651) [Link]

Sorry, but your statement of the history of this problem is completely untrue. I am an OpenSSH and OpenBSD developer who spent many hours trying to get to the bottom of this.

Your assertion that "Theo won't fix it because it is only Linux" is simply a lie and demeans those of us who try to make OpenSSH a quality product for all operating systems.

Your LKML link talks about a completely different issue (ssh TCP connection attempts vs SYN timeouts) that was fixed *years* ago. See the ConnectionAttempts and ConnectTimeout options in "man ssh_config".

You can see the history of the real hang on exit bug here: http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52

There have been several simple but incorrect patches proposed for this problem, all of which create other problems. We have *never* asked for Linux kernel behaviour to change, only for someone more knowledgable about the interaction between ttys, grandchild processes and select() to assist us debug the problem.

Only recently has someone actually done this work (patch is in bugzilla above) - if it works out OK then it will probably be committed in the near future. However, very few people have actually stepped forward to test the patch.