Re: Login string FUBAR; what package does this?

["Jens B. Jorgensen" <jjorgens@bdsinc.com>]

Joost Kooij wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, Jens B. Jorgensen wrote:
>
> > Ah yes. Welcome to the magic of telnetd/login and getty/login. The first
> > login: prompt is supplied by your getty/telnetd. When you type in your
> > login and hit enter, the getty/telnetd execs /bin/login, passing the
> > username you typed in. If you enter an incorrect login, control does not
> > pass back to your getty/telnetd but instead /bin/login spits out another
> > login: prompt. Pretty clever no? (No.) This is rather annoying but this way
> > of "logging people in" is quite ingrained in unix.
> >
> > Anyway, I believe /bin/login gets the prompt from /etc/issue. Perhaps a bug
> > should be filed regarding '\?' substitution.
>
> Hmm, what package has it all wrong then?
>
> $ dpkg -S /etc/issue
> base-files: /etc/issue
> $ dpkg -S /bin/login
> login: /bin/login

African or European package? Whaaaaaaaaa....

That's a matter of opinion I suspect. There may not be agreement on the point
between the maintainers of these packages. I don't see anything in the /bin/login
man page which indicates that replacement will be made for '\?' sequences in
/etc/issue. In fact, the man page doesn't mention /etc/issue at all. A quick look
at /etc/login.defs indicates there *is* a variable to control whether or not
/etc/issue is printed before the 'login:' prompt.

Looking at the mgetty man page (I  suspect you use mgetty and this is where you
see this prompt) I see:

       -i <issue file>
              Output  <issue  file>  instead of /etc/issue before
              prompting for the user name. The same token substi­
              tutions  as  for  the  the login prompt are done in
              this file.

My conclusion is that if any package is at fault, it would be mgetty for using
special formatting on a file that is used by more that one package/program. As
far as a fix goes, I believe mgetty should have its own issue file (perhaps
/etc/mgetty/issue). You could easily do this since you can specify the issue file
to mgetty while you can't to /bin/login.

NOTE: take a look at 'strings /bin/login | sort -u | less'. There appear to be
all sorts of things in there that aren't defined or discussed in the man page.
Looks like we need a new man page.

--
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com



--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .