Re: devfs question

From: Khimenko Victor (khim@sch57.msk.ru)
Date: Sat Jul 15 2000 - 14:52:44 EDT

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    In <39709DC8.D460C273@wanadoo.fr> Martin Costabel (costabel@wanadoo.fr) wrote:
    > John Covici wrote:
    >>
    >> Hi. I was reading the readme in the 2.4.0-test2 kernel documentation
    >> tree for defs when I ran into the following mysterious passage
    >>
    >> /etc/securetty
    >> PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) is supposed to be a flexible
    >> mechanism for providing better user authentication and access to
    >> services. Unfortunately, it's also fragile, complex and undocumented
    >> (check out RedHat 6.1, and probably other distributions as well). PAM
    >> has problems with symbolic links. Append the following lines to your
    >> /etc/securetty file:
    >>
    >> 1
    >> 2
    >> 3
    >> 4
    >> 5
    >> 6
    >> 7
    >> 8
    >>
    >> What does this mean since /etc/security is a directory and where
    >> shhould these lines go anyway?

    > Isn't that obsolete anyway?

    It is.

    > The devfs documentation does not always follow the devfs API changes.

    True, but it's not the case.

    > In any case, if I want to login as root, I have to put

    > vc/1
    > vc/2

    > and so on into /etc/securetty.

    Correct. This is since my one-liner change was incorporated in linux-utils
    (NOT in devfs!) more then 8 months ago. So it can be true or false depending
    on version of linux-utils NOT depending on version of devfs. With old
    linux-utils you can write "0" in securetty and suddenly root login will
    be allowed from /dev/vc/0, /dev/pts/0, /dev/tts/0 - in fact <anything>/0
    was allowed. Since it does not look good from security standpoint
    linux-utils were patched. Now you can specify what you REALLY want:
    vc/0 or tts/0 ...

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