Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Path: utzoo!lsuc!dave
From: dave@lsuc.uucp (David Sherman)
Subject: Re: login program and slow-scrolling terminals
Reply-To: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Date: Sun, 3-Jan-88 20:37:24 EST
Summary: filtering control characters from getty/login no problem
Message-ID: <1988Jan3.203726.864@lsuc.uucp>
References: <1505@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto

haynes@ucscc.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes) writes:
>We run a port selector, which types a fair amount of message-of-the-day to
>the user's terminal; but this might happen even without a port selector.
>
>If the terminal is in a slow scrolling mode it can't always keep up with
>incoming characters at 2400 baud, so it will try to restrain input with
>ctrl-S, and follow with ctrl-Q when it catches up.  We found this happening
>with the initial getty message and login: prompt.  The result is that the
>user's login name is prefixed by ^S^Q and the first attempt to log in always
>fails.  I'm wondering if there is any reason not to modify getty and login
>to strip out any funny characters in the login name.

Should be no problem. We did that years ago, along with other, similar
changes to accommodate an environment of a thousand new computer-naive
law students a year, spread out across the province and using, in some
cases, very peculiar equipment which may have been set up for them by
someone else.  Our getty and login do things such as
- mapping all chars to lower-case (instead of the stty LCASE nonsense
  which goes back to the days of caps-only terminals);
- mapping the password to lower-case and trying again if password fails;
- stripping out ^S and ^Q
- ignoring spaces in the login name
etc.

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
Toronto
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