Re: mysterious disappearing xterms
Re: mysterious disappearing xterms
- Subject: Re: mysterious disappearing xterms
- From: Steve Lidie <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2006 14:44:54 -0500
On Feb 14, 2006, at 2:12 PM, Bill Campbell wrote:
On Tue, Feb 14, 2006, Steve Lidie wrote:
On Feb 13, 2006, at 3:32 PM, email@hidden wrote:
I get this pretty frequently when I initially start up X11, but
never later on when I create an xterm from the menu.
Anyone from Apple listening in? It's a little annoying (but not
enough to switch to Windows... :-)
I too have xterms that momentarily flash into existence and then go
away. As noted above, it happens frequently at startup, but it does
happens at any time thereafter. It seems random, and I have found
nothing is the logs to help, sorry.
The only time I've seen xterms disappear spontaneously is when it's
an ssh
connection to a remote machine outside our firewall, and there
hasn't been
any activity for an extended period of time.
In this case I'm reasonably sure that it has to do with IP NAT or
Masquerading (our firewall is a rather ancient Linux box, still
running
ipchains :-). I think that the masquerading is lost after some
period of
inactivity since I can run something on the remote machine like
``top'' to
insure that there's some activity and the xterm won't disappear.
Yes, inactivity timeouts have bitten me in the past. I'm sure that's
not my current (minor) problem :)
I typically have more than 20 xterms open at any time on my Tiger
box. All
are started as children of the original xterm that starts when I
start X11.
My first commands in that xterm are ``exec ssh-agent ksh'' then
``ssh-add''
to enter my ssh pass phrase. Then I execute a menu program that
fires off
xterms to other systems as necessary so all are children of the ssh-
agent.
My ephemeral xterms can happen anytime, at X11 startup or hours/days
later. I actually use an "ssh term" command that's just a simple
Perl program that execs xterm with -e and an ssh command, the salient
portion of which is:
my $xterm = "/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm -T '$where' -bg '#f0e8ffbdffbd' -fg
darkblue -geometry 100x48 -font 9x15 -sb -sl 10000";
my $s = fork;
if( $s != 0 ) {
exit 0;
} elsif( $s == 0 ) {
$xterm .= " -e '/usr/bin/ssh -Y $where'" if $#ARGV == 0;
exec $xterm;
} else{
die "fork failed: $!";
}
It's not a fork problem, I'd see an error message. My .xinitrc is
rather plain as well:
#!/bin/sh
. ~/.profile
color="-bg '#f0e8ffbdffbd' -fg darkblue"
xterm -sb -sl 1000 -font 9x15 -geometry 120x48+0+0 $color -T
"Dragonfly"&
exec /usr/X11R6/bin/quartz-wm
Sometimes even the above xterm will flash and then disappear.
======
On an unrelated note, I notice that when I'm ssh'ed into a remote
machine and then fire-up a VPN connection all my X11 windows die. I
wouldn't complain were it not for the fact that Safari, Mail - all
other Apple apps - can weather the network change, except X11!
I think there may well be some memory leaks though because if I've
had my
login going for extended periods of time (days), it will occassionally
start getting extremely slow when it goes into swapping requiring a
system restart.
This is probably not X11 specific, I've heard of this for a number of
years. I too run 24x7, so maybe that's part of the problem ... don't
know ... time will tell I suppose.
Steve
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