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From: rlw@ttardis.UUCP (Ron Wilson)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general,comp.sys.att
Subject: Re: Who is "logged in" when you are running multiple login windows?
Message-ID: <2507@ttardis.UUCP>
Date: 20 Mar 90 04:15:37 GMT
Organization: Gallifrey
Lines: 41

In article <4518@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>, andy@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Andy S Poling) writes:
>effectively, does the same thing as checking utmp, then tty ownership.  I
>don't run the UA anymore so I don't know if my scheme works any better with
>it.  However (and this is a reasonably big however :-) since my manager also
>logs people in, it routinely (every 2 secs) checks whether any closed
>windows are improprly represented in utmp and changes the utmp entries for
>those windows to reflect a logout.  I think this would make that troublesome
>UA window "invisible" since utmp would show it as "logged out".

What troublesome UA window?

> I consider
>this proper behavior on the part of my software - to act otherwise would
>throw security out the window.

Your window manager sounds a "little" busy - I mean why do you need to constant-
ly rework the utmp file?  When a window is allocated (by open("/dev/window",...)
), update the utmp entry, and then the same when the window is deallocated (by
the final close).

BTW: the utmp file is not intended (nor used by the kernal) for security
purposes - it is an informational file maintained by getty and login - I
know from experience that a messed up utmp doesn't hurt system security -
any program that relies on utmp to be correct should be rewritten - the ONLY
use I make of the utmp/wtmp info is for connect time statistics.

>The real problem is that the UA was intended for a single user environment.

The UA works quite well in a multi user environment - many of my users DO
use it (ttardis is a BBS) - my only complaint is that there appears to be
no way to get it to accept \r (ASCII 13 deciaml - carraige return) as ENTER -
not all of ttardis's users have terminals with line feed keys, and, unfortu-
nately, I know the physical keyboard layouts to be able to assign function
keys appropriately.  Also, if anybody knows a way to specify what the the
screen labeled function keys do in UA - I would like that too.

- Ron Wilson
rlw@ttardis
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