Mike Egglestone <megglestone@heritage.sd57.bc.ca> [2002-10-21 15:16:15 -0700]: > I wanted the write. > We have lots of servers with lots of techs. > Some of them are very new to Debian. > So, when were working on systems its nice to chat. > We use the "talk" program as you mentioned. > but as root is defaulted to mesg n then its nice > to echo a message to their screen to say something like: > "hey turn you mesg n to mesg y so you can talk with me" > or something like that. Writing to a root tty is going to be a security hole. All modern terminals implement the capability to send commands to them to have them turn right around and send the commands back to the computer. A terrible security hole but so it is. Any user with tty write capability open can have any one else on the machine to run commands as them. This is especially bad for root. Assuming you can accept that risk then there are things you can try. You would need to create a special purpose way of writing to root. Perhaps a 'sudo write'? The sudo command allows you to configure what commands you allow to run as root. Bob
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