russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence) (12/16/88)
Thanks to the internet virus, a neighbor of mine has finally(!) decided
to abandon his former practice of handing out his root password to
people in charge of after-hours backups and shutdowns. Unfortunately,
when he tried to bring up a canned login designed for powerdown on
his 3B2/500 (3.1.1 v3), the subsequent shell bombed out with an error
message complaining about its inability to change directories, ie 'cd'. I
suspect that these messages were coming from /etc/shutdown.
The administrative logins listed in his passwd file for backup,
powerdown, formatting, etc, depended on rsh's so their inability to
change directories doesn't seem to be a big mystery to me. What is a
mystery is this: was the failure was inherent in the original release?
Or, has someone been grossly hacking on the various .profiles and
scripts in his system? Has anybody else encountered a similar problem?
Any suggestions on getting the problem resolved would be appreciated.
BTW, on my system running 5.2, I handle administrative duties via logins
having root's uid, but with scripts designated in place of a shell in
the passwd field. When I tried this approach on my neighbor's 3B2,
however, it didn't work and bombed out after displaying 'no shell' on
the console. Comments?
--
Russell Lawrence, WP Group, New Orleans (504) 456-0001
{uunet,killer}!wpg!russ