30 second startup delay on Cygwin programs from SYSTEM account

[Scott Atwood]

> I am running Cygwin 1.3.3 on Windows 2000 Server, and I have noticed a
> strange problem.  Whenever I try to start a Cygwin process from a windows
> cmd shell as the user SYSTEM, there is an approximately 30 second delay
> before the process starts.  If I have started a bash process as SYSTEM,
> subesequent processes started from within bash start normally.  Cygwin
> processes always start normally for the Administrator user.
>
> I have looked in the FAQ and the documentation, searched Google, and
> searched the Cygwin mailing list archive, and I couldn't find any
> mention of this problem.

I ran "strace bash" as user SYSTEM and here is an excerpt of the output.

 2949  226918 [main] bash 1428 internal_getlogin: GetUserName() = SYSTEM
30450200 30677118 [main] bash 1428 internal_getlogin: Domain: (null), Logon Serv
er: CHARON, Windows Username: SYSTEM

The output paused for about 30 seconds after the first line printed, and
before the second line printed.

Here is the same section of "strace bash" for user Administrator:

 2980  255639 [main] bash 1708 internal_getlogin: GetUserName() = Administrator
  831  256470 [main] bash 1708 internal_getlogin: User: Administrator, Domain: C
HARON, Logon Server: CHARON
305105  561575 [main] bash 1708 internal_getlogin: Domain: CHARON, Logon Server:
CHARON, Windows Username: Administrator


And again as user SYSTEM from within an already running bash process:

 1435  282240 [main] bash 1212 internal_getlogin: GetUserName() = SYSTEM
365580  647820 [main] bash 1212 internal_getlogin: Domain: (null), Logon Server:
CHARON, Windows Username: SYSTEM


I downloaded the cygwin 1.3.3 source code, and I was able to isolate these
lines of output as coming from the internal_getlogin method in the
winsup/cygwin/uinfo.cc file, somewhere between line 41 and 114.


I don't know enough about the structure of the cygwin DLL to be able to
isolate the problem any closer than that, since there are many method
calls in this region of the code.

-Scott


--
Scott Atwood
atwood@cs.stanford.edu
PGP key fingerprint:  2852 FAE0 B0BB FE52 7002  1019 4D48 78B3 6FF0 A89F

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