Re: Bug#3227: login refuses, and then allows, root login on tty?
In article <[🔎] Pine.SOL.3.93.960607060025.23153J-100000@brando.ece.utexas.edu> you write:
>On Fri, 7 Jun 1996, Michael Nonweiler wrote:
>
>> The error message is "root login not allowed..." etc. ie. /etc/securetty
>> problem, but /etc/securetty is correct, and things soon start to work...
>> I don't think syslog problems could cause this.
>
>This line from Dirk's auth.log is illuminating. Note the last 2
>characters:
>Jun 5 16:29:20 miles login: LOGIN root REFUSED ON TTY tty??
>
>The ?? means that the call to ttyname(0) returned NULL. The man page
>for ttyname() says it can fail if the fd is not connected to a
>terminal. I'll have to check libc if there are other ways that it
>could fail.
Not necessarily; in my experience with utmp, a line of '??' means
that utmp has somehow become corrupted. These entries should
really be marked as UT_DEAD (or whatever the flag should be for
the type).
There is a race _somewhere_; leading to these out-of-date utmp
entries. I haven't been able to track it down yet :(
Austin
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