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Re: mesg and devfs



On Sat, Aug 11, 2001 at 10:39:31PM +0200, Hugo van der Merwe wrote:
> When I start an rxvt, /dev/pts/* is created with hugo.hugo owndership.
> mesg demands that the group be tty. If hy change the group to tty, 
> "mesg y" works fine. Might this be something one can fix with
> /etc/devfs/* settings? Anyway, I think this should be fixed, either the
> permissions have to be "group tty", or mesg needs to be fixed to work if
> the group is also me...?
> 

mesg is doing the right thing,  world writable ttys are a bad thing,
there is nothing to stop a obnoxious user from doing 
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/<someones-tty>  which will screw up thier
terminal as if they had done it themselves.  write and wall prevent
the terminal from being screwed up.

on some unixes is possible to control the user's shell and programs
when thier tty is world writable, but in the one example i have seen
it did not work under linux.

-- 
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/

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