Re: making Debian secure by default
On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 05:23:36PM +0100, Florent Rougon wrote:
> Did anyone try 'mesg n' here? I tried:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> $ mesg n
> $ mesg; echo $?
> is n
> 1
>
> Broadcast message from root@hostname (pts/1) (Thu Mar 28 16:48:13 2024):
>
> pouet
You can't stop root from writing to your terminal. Root has write
privileges on all devices.
The purpose of mesg is to allow *other regular users* to send you
messages, or not. People have focused so much on "wall" in this
thread, but wall is usually used by root, or by the OS itself, to
send broadcast notices of major events like impending reboots.
The more common tool for users to talk to each other on their terminals
is write(1). Or if you wanted to have a conversation, there's talk(1).
Or rather, there's supposed to be talk(1). I have a POSIX man page
for it, but not a Debian one, and the program itself doesn't appear to
be installed. Maybe it's in a separate package.
I have write(1) from the bsdextrautils package. There is a talk package
but I haven't installed it.
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