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SCO Telnet session open for 40 days

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by grege

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I just came across an odd situation at a customer's site.

They had inadvertantly left a Telnet session open to a box running SCO for over 40 days. The screen on the other machine had gone black to save power around day 1.

When someone finallycame back to the terminal, the words "Don't you love me anymore" or something to that effect were just scrolling repeatedly on the Telnet session.

Anyone know if this is SCO's way of just warning you that you left the session open? (I've seen similar things back on UNIX mainframes in college).

Thanks in advance!
-Greg E.

3 replies

by techrepublic

Sounds like it.
It would almost make me want to install SCO to see, but given the farce that is SCO licensing...

Could you get it to stop scrolling, or did you have to kill the telnet session? The other possibility is, some admin has installed something that will lock out idle sessions, so it might not be a part of the base OS.

by joey indolos

Any possibility that it might have been the output of a virus that took advantage of the open connection? Just wondering. Sorry if you find this paranoid, but I've had a lot of trouble with viruses that take advantage of users who leave connections, shares, etc. open and unprotected. But then again, most of the users I support use Windows ;-)

by paulo.sedrez

HA!

My guess is some other user saw the long idle time with the w command and useed write to play with you. Just as example:

~$ w
5:54am up 25 days, 1:32, 23 users, load average: 2.43, 2.57, 2.38
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
user tty1 - 14Sep03 19days 0.11s 0.11s -bash

~$ yes "Don't you love me anymore" | write user tty1

This will have the same effect.

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