emjej@uokvax.UUCP (11/21/84)
I use an OS-9 system that has a modem. The startup file is set to fire up a tsmon on the modem, since we have people who dial up and hack. However, there are times that we'd like to dial out as well. Currently, the only way to do it is to (1) look and make sure that nobody's dialed up, (2) login as root and kill the tsmon, (3) fire up your favorite modem program (it's nice if you don't do this as root), and (4) as root, fire up the tsmon (we wrote our revised login, which uses encrypted pass- words, in C, and if you run tsmon from a non-root userid, the setuid is ignored...). This is not nice--not only should it not be necessary to be superuser to dial out, but with the vagaries of system usage, the particular tsmon that controls the modem varies, making it hard to tell which process should go on the chopping block. My question is this: how does one go about writing a program that will look at data both coming from and going to a modem device and decide what to do (either run login or pass stuff on without comment, respectively)? Can such a beast run in a reasonably efficient manner (i.e. without excessive device polling)? Any suggestions or discussion would be most welcome. James Jones