Well, I guess I should explain a little how I found that this happens in the
first place. I don't generally do this.
Basically, I have an acct on my machine for a friend, and he logs in and tries
to catch my attention so we can `talk' (both of us being at univs where net
access is free, this is a lot cheaper than phone). The way he did this is to
start X. Once he decided to see how many X's he could start before the machine
started thrashing, and it died at the second.
Considering that most distributions install X so that anybody can start it, even
if he's not at the console, it might be considered a security issue. Currently I
put a wrapper around startx so only I can start it.
>
> Try to shutdown a machine from within X - this will hang your machine too.
> This is not a kernel bug, neither it is X. It is just doing stupid things
> (as root, and X "is" root-privileged) in UNIX causes problems. It is fine
> by me ;)
>
why is shutting down a machine from within X stupid? I don't understand this.
If I have sysvinit, and my default runlevel is 5, then I would expect to be
able to shut down my system by typing /sbin/shutdown or whatever in an xterm.
-- arvind
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