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From: guy@gorodish.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: login gripes
Message-ID: <15831@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 30-Mar-87 04:05:34 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.15831
Posted: Mon Mar 30 04:05:34 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 31-Mar-87 04:59:00 EST
References: <8703231450.AA18626@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: guy@sun.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 54

>Two puzzling things about 'login'. 
>a) What on earth does it do between the time I hit return on the username line
>   and the time it gives me back the Password prompt?

If you've just dialed up the system, it's not "login" you type your
username to, it's "getty", and what it's doing is (among other
things) running "login".

>   Can't it turn echoing off right away so that when I am in a hurry the
>   first few characters of my password don't end up on the screen?

Maybe, but this would cause odd behavior if you didn't have a
password and typed commands ahead (but then again, you should always
have a password if you don't have a very restricted login shell).
Also, note that the 4.2 version of "getty" can be configured so that
it runs some program other than "login" after it gets the username;
those programs would have to understand that echoing is turned off
when they are started.

>   Why do these characters get ignored?

Because "getty" normally runs in RAW mode, while the password is
collected in cooked mode.  When you switch to or from RAW mode,
unread input is discarded.

>b) Any fundamental reason why true baud rate detection is not provided?
>   Sure sounds like "lets cycle through speeds for now -- we'll fix that
>   later"...

If by "true baud rate detection" you mean autobauding, where you type
something like CR at the system and it figures out the baud rate from
what the CR appeared as, the reason it's not provided may be that
your system administrator didn't set it up.  It appears to be
provided by "getty", although for some unknown reason it isn't
documented in the 4.3 manual page.  The comment in the code says

 * This auto-baud speed select mechanism is written for the Micom 600
 * portselector. Selection is done by looking at how the character '\r'
 * is garbled at the different speeds.

and it attempts to distinguish between 300 baud, 1200 baud, 2400
baud, 4800 baud, and 9600 baud.  If you set up a port as an auto-baud
port, by specifying the "Auto-baud" entry as the "gettytab" entry for
that port, it will wait for a CR and then select one of "300-baud",
"1200-baud", "2400-baud", "4800-baud", or "9600-baud" as the entry
for that port.

It also claims to support a Develcon port selector (according to the
comments - the manual page says a MICOM port selector) which will
send a baud rate string at a predefined baud rate.  This can be
selected by the "DSW" entry; it will select one of "std.110",
"std.134", "std.150", ... "std.19200" based on the message.

I haven't tried any of this, so I don't know if it really works.