rlogin problem between Sun 3.2 and 2.9 BSD

[rbd at lamont.UUCP]

Our site just upgraded all of our Suns from Sun 3.0 UNIX
to Sun 3.2 UNIX. This upgrade has broken the rlogin on
our PDP 11/70 running 2.9 BSD. (Prior to this upgrade,
we never experienced any difficulty with rlogin between
these machines.) Symptoms are:

	i) When rlogging in from a Sun to the PDP, the PDP
	   accepts the connection, prints out /etc/motd,
	   and then immediately logs you out with a
	   "Connection closed." message.

       ii) Attempting to rlogin from the PDP to a Sun
	   crashes the PDP about 75% of the time with a
	   "panic: dtom" message, and
	   succeeds the other 25% of the time.

Telnet, rsh and rcp have all been working normally. The Sun 3.0
rlogin and in.rlogind also worked normally with the PDP when they were
restored from a backup tape. These facts, together with Sun's
admission that there were major alterations made to rlogin
and in.rlogind between 3.0 and 3.2 (mostly to pass along
window size information), seem to point the finger directly
at an incompatibility between the Sun 3.2 and PDP 2.9 rlogins.

Is this due to a lack of robustness in the 2.9 networking (possible
bug fix in 2.10?) or is Sun doing something to rlogin that is
incompatible with 2.9 and maybe other systems as well? We would
greatly appreciate hearing from other sites experiencing similar
problems. Does anyone have a fix for this?


			Roger Davis
			Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory
			Palisades, NY 10964
			(914) 359-2900 x547
			{seismo,decvax,ihnp4}!philabs!lamont!rbd