Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)

[Steve Willer <willer@interlog.com>]

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Marek Habersack wrote:

> > Nope. ssh invokes the command you request by calling your shell, 
> > with the '-c' argument, so if your shell is dynamically linked, sh 
> > will fail to exec it, and your command (sash) won't get run.
> No, ssh invokes either an interactive shell or the command specified on the
> command line.

Actually, this is kinda interesting. I just tried it out, and I couldn't
execute /bin/sash via ssh on my own account. I got two errors about libc
missing.

My root account has the default .profile, I think, and I was able to
convince it to run sash. I had to use ssh's -t parameter to make it work.
I got one libc error, but it continued. I can only assume ssh is executing
your startup files with bash but perhaps not running the command through
bash?

The difference between the two users, as far as I can tell, is that my
user's .bash_profile says:

   . ~/.bashrc

I guess this is what locked me out.

The conclusion, then, is that it is possible to get into a system that has
sash installed but isn't using sash as root's prompt...if you're very
careful about your startup script.