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From: wescott@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM (Mike Wescott)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: weird bug with passwd and /dev/syscon
Message-ID: <933@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 13:07:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: sauron.933
Posted: Fri Oct 16 13:07:41 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 22:18:12 EDT
References: <298@boole.acc.virginia.edu>
Reply-To: wescott@sauron.Columbia.NCR.COM (Mike Wescott)
Organization: Entry Level Systems Development, NCR Corp., Columbia, SC
Lines: 19

In article <298@boole.acc.virginia.edu> ejc@boole.acc.virginia.edu (Elizabeth Cummings) writes:
> 
>    We noticed the following bug the other day with some of our 3b2's.  
> When /dev/syscon is linked to a tty line, say tty11, you can't run the 
> passwd command on that tty line without giving passwd an argument.
> 
>     Does anyone know why this happens?

passwd (without arguments) is looking in /etc/utmp to find who is logged in.
It does this by checking to see which tty it has been invoked on and finds
/dev/syscon.  /dev/syscon has an entry in /etc/utmp (probably a dead one)
and passwd gets confused.

An easy workaround is to reorder your /dev directory so that /dev/syscon and
/dev/systty are after all of the /dev/tty?? entries with no unused entries 
before the last tty?? entry.
-- 
	-Mike Wescott
	 wescott@ncrcae.Columbia.NCR.COM