Comment 9 for bug 805423

My login session never timeout, I was actually authenticated but never saw a prompt.

I let it running (sitting there) over night and the shell was still 'active' there after 8 hours – but no prompt.

The load had nothing to do with this. I booted the server (pretty blank), logged in and then further attempts failed right away. If I waited too long (and I don't have an exact time), I could not log in at all.

I *think* it stalled at trying to find out how many people are logged in to the system. I saw a "[who] defunct" in my process list. But I have no idea why that caused the my login process to block.

I looked at this script and also ran it while I was logged in and it completely within reason. Though I would say that it adds too much time to the login still. It's a noticable delay.

Btw, check out the 'ask ubuntu' link I left in my comment, it contains the process list with the defunct who and the sysinfo script running.