From: nish.des on
Hello,

I am running SuSE 9.0 with kernel 2.4.21-99 on an oldish machine.
Something weird happened today. The following is part of the output of
'last'.

nishita pts/3 ipc41.mri.ernet. Wed Jan 30 23:34 still logged
in
nishita pts/6 Wed Jan 30 13:53 gone - no
logout <<
nishita pts/5 ff15.dhcp.hri Wed Jan 30 13:42 - 13:56
(00:14)
nishita pts/0 Tue Jan 22 09:30 - 23:40
(8+14:10)

There's a mystery entry with "gone - no logout." As far as I can
remember, nothing extra-ordinary happened today. This is an office
machine, so I don't even have root access.

Some googling tells me this has been attributed to a bug in:
1. openSSH (in 1994) [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?
bug=243880]
2. reiserfs and later to ntpdate (in 2003) [http://archive.cert.uni-
stuttgart.de/suse-security/2003/02/msg00019.html]

But both of these bugs are way too old to remain unfixed.

This phenomenon isn't causing any damage, but seems a bit too wierd.
Can anyone help me understand what's going on here?

Regards,
Nishita Desai
Allahabad, India.